This is about thew new starter cost.

When a developer joins a team, they will not be as productive as they have to learn the code, frameworks, libraries, the project purpose, the tooling, etc… Often this impacts other members of the team lowering the entire teams productivity.

When you use productivity tracking (e.g. things like capacity planning) you will see the teams performance drop and it will take time for it to exceed the previous measured performance. This is the cost of adding a new starter.

So if it takes 6 weeks for a new starter to increase overall team producitivty then planning someone on a project for 4 weeks is pointless since the team will have a higher delivery rate without the extra person. This is typically why an organsation loses its ability to migrate staff between projects.

Code formating affects the layout of the code and our brains do all sorts of tricks around pattern recognition, so if your code formatting rules are too different a someone migrating between projects has to spend time looking for code and retraining their brain.

Its an additional barrier and a one within an organisations skills to remove (by forcing a common code standard).

The last part is why you use an IDE.

Several of them will ingest prettier files to build code formatting rules

• https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=esbenp.prettier-vscode
• https://www.jetbrains.com/help/webstorm/prettier.html
• https://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/prettier-formatter

IDE support is normally a good way to work out what the wider community is using.

Python is unique in formatting forms part of the syntax, every language has linters but its far more common for orgs to tweak the default rules .

For example Java has Checkstyle. The default rules ‘sun checks’ give a line length of 80, tabs are 4 spaces and everything is placed on a new line.

Junior devs inevitably want to trash the line length (honestly on 1080p monitors, 120 makes sense,).

There is always a new line/same line discussion (everyone perfers same line but there is always one die hard new line person).

The tab width discussion always has one junior dev complain that “tabs are better”, as someone who started development on Visual Studio 6 where half the team double spaced, the other half used tabs. Those people get a lecture from me on how we can convert tabs to spaces but not the inverse so it will always be spaces if I am near.

With Checkstyle you upload the rule file as an artifact into your M2 repository. Then you can pull it down as a dependency when the checkstyle plugin runs.

As someone who bought Half Life 2 when it was released …

I only remember people being excited about Steam, Web stores weren’t a thing back then and they were the future! (It was the following years of audio and ebook stores locking stuff down and evapourating that taught us to hate it).

Game/Audio CD DRM hacking the kernel and breaking/massively slowing down your PC was pretty common back then and Steam’ s DRM didn’t do that.

The HL2 disc installer didn’t require you to install Steam, once installed it asked you to setup Steam and there was a sticker under the DVD with the Steam code for you to enter.

You were then rewarded with a copy of HL2 Deathmatch and Counterstrike Source.

Steam wasn’t always on DRM, back then ADSL/DSL was relatively new and alot of people were still stuck on Dial Up modems.

Steam let you sign in and authorize your games for 30 days at which point you would need to log into Steam again. This was incredibly helpful feature for young me.

Basically Epic like every other publisher has created their own launcher/store.

They aren’t trying to compete on features and instead using profits from their franchise to buy market share (e.g. buying store exclusives).

The tone and strategy often comes off as aggressive and hostile.

For example Valve was concerned Microsoft were going to leverage their store to kill Steam. Valve has invested alot in adding windows operability to Linux and ensuring Linux is a good gaming platform. To them this is the hedge against agressive Microsoft business practices.

The Epic CEO thinks Windows is the only operating system and actively prevents Linux support and revoked Linux support from properties they bought.

As a linux user, Valve will keep getting my money and I literally can’t give it to Epic because they don’t want it.

I avoid any company that requires a software test before the interview.

I worked for a company that introduced them after I joined, I collected evidence all of the companies top performers wouldn’t have joined since we all had multiple offers and having to do the test would put people off applying. The scores from it didn’t correlate with interview results so it was being ignored by everyone. Still took 2 years to get rid of it.

The best place used STAR (Situation Task Action Result) based interviews. The goal was to ask questions until you got 2 stars.

I thought these were great because it was more varied and conversational but there was a comparable consistency accross interviewers.

You would inevitably get references to past work and you switch to asking a few questions about that. Since it was around a situation you would get more complete technical explanations (e.g. on that project I wrote an X and Y was really challenging because of Z).

I loved asking “Tell me about something your really proud off”. Even a nervous junior would start opening up after that question.

After an hour interview you would end up with enough information you could compare them against the company gradings (junior, senior, etc…).

This was important because it changed the attitude of the interview. It wasn’t a case of if the candidate would be a good senior dev for project X, but an assessment of the candidate. If they came out as a lead and we had a lead role, lets offer them that.

Python's public API changes subtly, so minor changes in Python version can lead to massive changes in the version of dependencies you use.

A few years ago we developed a script to update Cassandra on Python 2.7.Y. Production environment used Python 2.7.X (it was 5 patch releases earlier).

This completely changed the cassandra library version. We had to go back 15 patch releases which annoying resulting in a breaking change in the Cassandra libraries API and wouldn't work on the dev environments Python.

Python 3 hasn't solved this, 2 years ago I was asked to look at a number of Machine Learning projects running in docker. Upgrading Python from 3.4 to 3.8 had a huge effect on dependencies and figuring out the right combination was a huge pain.

This is a solved problem in Java, Node.js has the same weakness but their changes to language spec are additive so old code runs on new releases (just not the inverse). Ruby has exactly the same issues as Python

Years ago there was no way to share IDE settings between developers.

You ended up with some developers choosing a tab width of 2 spaces, some choosing 4 spaces and as there was no linting enforcement some people using 2-4 spaces depending on their IDE settings.

This resulted in an unreadable mess as stuff was idented to all sorts of random levels.

It doesn't matter if you use tabs or spaces as long as only one type is consistently used within a project.

Spaces tends to win because inevitably there are times you need to use spaces and so its difficult to ensure a project only uses tabs for identation.

IDE's support converting tabs into spaces based on tab width and code formatting will ensure correct indentation. You can now have centralised IDE settings so everyone gets the same setup.

Honestly 99% of people don't care about formatting (they only care when consistency isn't enforced and code is hard to read), there is always one person who wants a 60 charracter line width or only tabs or double new lined parathensis. Who then sucks up huge amounts of the team time arguing their thing is a must while they code in emacs, unlike the rest of the team using an actual ide.

Maven has unit and integration test phases and there are a multitude of plugins designed to hook into those phases but there are constraints by design.

Trying to hook everything into the build management system is a source of technical debt, your using a tool for something it wasn’t designed.

I would look at what makes sense within the build management system and what makes sense in a CI pipeline.

CI tools have different DSL and usually provide a means to manage environments. Certain integration and system level tests are best performed there.

For instance I keep system tests as a seperate managed project. The project can be executed from developer machines for local builds but I also create a small build pipeline to build the project, deploy it and run the system tests against it triggered by pull requests.

This is why I say the build management system doesn’t really change, because you should treat everything as descrete standalone components.

The Parent POM gets updates once every six months, the basic build verification CI pipeline only changes to the latest language release, etc…

Projects which try to embed gitflow into a pom or integrate CD into the gradle file are the unbuildable messes I get asked to fix.

Maven has a high learning curve, but once learned it is incredibly simple to use.

That high bar is created by the tool configuration. You can change and hack everything, but you have to understand how Maven works to do so. This generally blocks people from doing really stupid things, because you have to learn how maven works to successfully modify it and in doing so you learn why you shouldn’t.

This is the exact weakness of Gradle, the barrier for modification is far lower and the tool is far less rigid. So you get lots of people who are still learning implement all sorts of weird and terrible practice.

The end result is I can usually dust off someone elses old maven project and it will build immediately using “mvn clean install”, about half the gradle projects I have been brought in on won’t without reverse engineering effort because they have things hard coded all over them. A not small percentage are so mangled they can’t be built without the dev who wrote it’s machine.

Also you really shouldn’t be tinkering with your build pipelines that much. Initial constraints determine the initial solution, then periodically you review them to improve. DevSecOps exists to speed development and ease support it isn’t a goal in of itself

You’ve just moved the packaging problem from distributions to app developers.

The reason you have issues is historically app developers weren’t interested in packaging their application so distributions would figure it out.

If app developers want to package deb, rpm, etc… packages it would also solve the problem.