Second Session Contract Data Report Template: Fill & Download for Free

The most important thing you as a CTO will learn is there is a difference between “writing code” and “writing ABOUT code”. There are lots of “best practices” touted by people whose job it is to go around to conventions, or write books, about writing code. Code is the easiest part of tech, which is why morons focus so much on it. Code doesn’t matter. Like at all. Your language doesn’t matter. Like at all.With that being said: most programmers with < 5 years experience are not really fit to do code review (and some with more experience are more unfit), because they are very much in love with their own mind, and their own ideas about how things can or should be done.Code Review is supposed to be a collaborative thing that people do willingly because they understand its utility in the team, it sounds to me like what you have is a bureaucratic compulsion for code review cause you read some blogs or books about “best practices”. All you’re going to do is make your devs passive aggressive. It’s obvious that for whatever reason, your code review is probably more about business inertia than ensuring quality.Code review in some companies is akin to a struggle session that would make Mao blush.Things that are essential in software development:Having a style guide (with minimal guidelines, don’t over engineer it), and solution guidelines if you have particular security/application concerns. Where I work, you have to create one controller per page, and not import any kind of code from anywhere else because the ACLs are based on the URL of the page and the hierarchy has legal obligations for security and so on.Having a unified development and deployment standard. Like the 12factor application, people have to stick to this, it’s so important. Any code that violates 12factor is bad code (for the goals of your application/business). Deployment needs to be well defined (Using gitlab, or something else, docker containers, blah blah). Same is true if you’re doing Qt C++ or Java, or anything.Have realistic performance constraints (the action must be completed in 13ms, or 500ms etc).Having these basic guidelines set up, code review should consider only these things. Does the code perform the required action within the expected time constraints? Does it violate any business or security practices? Is it using the style guide? Then it is fine. If you have people arguing over anti-patterns, or switch statements, or Exceptions, then you are paying your employees to be morons and you should stop paying them and find better developers.Think about it like this: Everyday you pay a moron is a day wasted. It’s better to pay $0 for nothing, than $20 for crap.What happens more often than not in these situations is that you get a group of apparently competent design pattern sycophants who choke down every nonsense blog or presentation with a sheksy name attached to it (We has to be Agiles! Teh Scrum is Best! No can use anti-pattern brah!).Personally, I think your best bet is to listen in on this code review, and write down the number of buzzwords used. These should be immediately banned on pain of public flogging.Anti-Pattern: This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard of. The term assumes that pattern programming is a good thing. Yeah, and the Sistine Chapel was paint by numbers? Pattern programming is software development for idiots. If you want to pay idiots, be my guest.Agile: This is a philosophy, and not necessarily a good one. In some situations agile is what you need, and sometimes it’s really dumb. There is currently no jet engine manufacturer using agile, and you don’t see Delta Airlines advertising the fact. “Your jet engine was manufactured by Acme Agile Shcrumlords, it was developed as quickly as possible by some 20 year old javascript nerds we hired over the internet, if you encounter any bugs, please report them immediately so we can iterate this design rapidly.”Behavior Driven Development (BDD): This is almost always a complete waste of time and money. Unit testing is okay, if you have the time, but it’s usually the first to go. When it isn’t, the unit tests are almost always trivial, and unrepresentative of the actual uses of the application. Some very large companies do get this right, and when they do, it is useful. But it’s notoriously difficult to get it right. Mostly it just causes delays. The best behavior testing is with beta testers. Get humans to do it. Remember, you pay the average dev something like minimum $42 an hour to do something you could pay a desperate college student $6.25 an hour to do and do better with more feedback. Sheesh, think McFly.MVC: For anything other than desktop applications this is stupid. If you are designing a desktop app, or a mobile app, MVC might be right for you. If you’re doing a web app, you’re wasting money and ressources. MVC is basically internet AIDS, we all contracted it from Ruby on Rails and there’s no cure in sight.Scrum: This is an agile product. Scrum is to Agile what high school debates are to Philosophy (like Stoicism, or Scepticism etc, like actual schools of philsophical thought). Putting your team’s todo-list on a big cork board with colorful post-it notes is good, calling it Scrum is retarded. It’s okay to have user stories, using sprints is dumb though, calling them sprints is worse.Mobile First: Everyone already knows, this is like saying water is wet.Dark Data: It’s just waste. Plain old waste.Severless: There is no such thing. What they mean is, managed server and framework. You pay for that. Severless means the slow crappy code you’ve paid these yahoos to choke up will now cost you twice as much as if you’d paid a few good programmers to do it right.Blockchain: A way to make any app slower than molasses on a winter’s day, and ensure it’s about as easy to scale as it would be to inflate a balloon made of wood with only the power of your lungs after smoking 3 packs of Kools concurrently.Full Stack: Someone who thinks nodejs is a good thing, as in Full Stack of Stupid. I like to call them “Half Stack” developers.Yoda Conditions: Which is writing all if statements backwards to avoid the least common mistake made by anyone who has been programming for more than 2 months.Camel,snake or StudlyCase: A rose by any other name. Who cares, just as long as it’s not Hungarian Notation.SOLID: A concise and concentrated acronym for the core stupidities of OOP.RAII: People who use this term, or act as if it is a thing, should be fired. Out of a canon. Into the Sun.Tabs vs. Spaces (or on which line to put the brace): It’s tabs you irredeemable barbarians, and the brace goes on the same line as the if you uncouth ruffians.Anything about templating languages: Mainly if you’re in PHP. PHP is already a templating language. Building another one on top of PHP is like painting white walls white so they will be white. Just remember, you’re paying these yahoos for this.DRY: As an acronym for Don’t Repeat Yourself, this one gets repeated an awful lot. Basically it’s a pipe dream. The first goal of code is to do stuff, the second goal of code is to be understood by the next developer. Projects created by DRY nutters are the worst, because you are going to be paying every single new dev by the hour to grep through hundreds of files to figure out what one function does. The only time DRY saves is that of the person who writes it first. But code isn’t written, it’s rewritten. DRY basically triples the time of maintenance and onboarding. Also, for long running projects, especially large ones, it even triples the time of the original writer to jog his memory about what a function does. DRY is a form of long-term technical debt, if MVC is internet AIDS, then DRY is Syphilis.Decorators/Decorator Pattern: A way to make it easier for bad programmers to implicitly wrap even the best algorithms in incredibly janky code. No matter what language or framework you use, the addition of Decorators would be like buying a Porsche and racing it through the La brea Tar Pits.Martin Fowler: The average developer talking about any design pattern or programming advice from Fowler is akin to the average fundamentalist Christian opining on St. Paul’s christology in the Epistles. Which is to say, the opinion of the average Half Stack developer on software design patterns is as useful as a screen door on a submarine.My solution to you is to make sure the children are playing nicely together, or to give up on code review at all. It’s really a silly requirement, you should be hiring the kind of developers who do this spontaneously. Don’t force it down their throats. At best you’re casting pearls before swine.Just a few things off the top of my head. Anyway, I have to go figure out how to erase crayon, I was writing a Java program on a roll of toilet paper I appropriated from the 7/11 bathroom thanks to the fortuitous apathy of a cellphone obsessed millennial clerk, and apparently I forgot the “l” in public static void main(String args[]). My compiler is a bit sensitive to such offensive language, especially when the VA keeps screwing with his meds, and the Martian Conglomerate won’t stop beaming orders to the chip implanted in his appendix. Ah the life of a coding-hobo.