this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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Programming
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You know what attribute of a code base is more valuable than any other? Maintainability.
Every project ever should emphasize maintainability over performance, cleverness, etc... because this is the true long term cost of code. If it's difficult to understand why or how something is how it is then you'll pay a lot more to bugfix it and improve it over time.
This attribute is opposed (mostly) to flexible prototyping so a really good senior dev will be able to transition a greenfield project into one that's structured for long term usability.
This is my mantra. Maintainability is king. I can't convince anyone designing our systems that this is more important than fancy 3rd party libraries that add some capability that only a couple of people will ever understand how to use, but will find it's way throughout the codebase and be a thorn in the side of bug fixes and new features for years.
Ah see, at my current company I'm employee 2/120 so I have adamantly advocated for this.
It's definitely a hard fucking sell though, nobody outside of the developers wants to invest in maintainability, bug fixing or infrastructure upgrades - you just need to force that shit through with clout. One thing I've found that helps is to try and form a technology steering committee that can try to advocate for the necessary investments. Approaching a problem as a group or talking to your manager about setting aside dedicated time to figure out which issues are most pressing can be quite effective. There is usually a trust barrier to overcome to allocate that time though.
That's cool if people can agree on what maintainability is, which changes improve it and which changes hurt it.
You can get two people arguing for the exact opposite thing, while both of them use maintainability as an argument.
And you're never going to get an easily maintainable code base without enabling those really good senior devs who can do that. It's more nuanced than the author of the article thinks, sometimes an unweildly process gets in the way of making changes required to improve maintainability.