Code Quality Q&A and Videos

What are some good books or online resources for learning how to write better code? I am looking for actual code examples demonstrating best practices for someone who already has programming experience but who wants to improve. Examples of topics I am looking to see covered would be whether a function should always include a return, when it makes sense to use try-catch instead of handling bad input with control flow, or when to use different approaches for handling invalid input.

I know that launching a product with bugs shows a reactive approach. Similarly, if a reviewer catches an issue you missed, that’s also reactive.

But what if you’re thorough in writing and testing your code locally, and you catch a missed dependency before even raising a PR? You fix it yourself without anyone else noticing. Does this reflect positively on you for solving it on your own, or does it still look bad because it was missed initially?

Taking it a step further, say you forget a simple null check, causing errors in your unit tests. You catch this yourself and fix it, but technically, you were still being reactive.

So, how do people realistically measure “reactive” vs. “proactive”? And how are scenarios viewed where you catch and resolve issues on your own while writing code?

I just watched Alex’s ”Level Up Your Code As A Software Engineer“ course. I wanted to ask about the first portion of the “Better Code Strategy” module.

A part that resonated with me is where Alex said he sees many junior devs fall into a trap of full stack when trying to specialize, which hinders them in the long run. It makes total sense that people would rather hire a 9/10 on front end than a 5/10 at front and back. I was in this situation at my previous employer - new grad role with a 4 month ramp up program. I didn't do so well on front end in training, and was told that I’d be placed in a back end role, so it “wouldn’t matter anyway”. Guess who got placed doing front end work? I had barely any support so I had to figure out everything myself. I was the only front end person on that team - the only other dev there was an L6 in back end. I also wasn’t good at communicating back then, so I was hindering the team a lot. 9 months later, I started handling front end. And right when I got good at handling front end tasks myself, I was told the architects wanted the apps my team was working on to make API calls to the backend rather than mid tier… so the team shifted focus to backend. I lost all my gains on backend by then, so that sucked. Another learning curve, within 2 months I gained independence. A week after I was told I was doing really well, I was laid off. Many people at the company outside of my team voiced that they put me in a "bad" position. I also point the finger at myself, because there was a lot that I needed to take accountability for.

Eventually, I got another job, doing database work. When I look at SQL, I see consistency in SQL and other coding languages. APIs, cloud, data, it all needs databases! To understand the world of code, it’s like everything draws back to databases. In my current role, as long as I pass the onboarding phase, then I can achieve excellence anywhere I go in my career with incredibly transferrable skills. Although I feel like I found where I’d like to dedicate time to specializing to get to the upper echelon of software engineering, I noticed I’m somebody who doesn’t mind what I do because I like everything I’ve seen so far. That’s why I figured to go for the niche that is “best” for all around career growth. With this in mind, what do you think the best fields to specialize in are?

When evaluating folks for promotion or in general developer experience in terms of measuring productivity of an engineer (junior, mid-level all the way up to tech lead), how is this measured when building any one particular project for 3 months?

I see Alex talk a lot about # of commits when evaluating the work of a code machine and watched the course he had on code quality, but can we give a more concrete example of what would be considered a single commit in a day/week that is substantial enough to satisfy at as such for a responsive web app, or a native (Android/iOS) app on any particular project?

I am thinking of scope since a lot of the time I can build a prototype from scratch - everything sans deploying fully into production (for an AI project or some other responsive web / native iOS app) within two days (think hackathon style) but not completely sloppy or super polished, but something working/basic functionality (and that has a number of commits), but I think I'm having trouble grasping what number of commits on any particular stack is considered substantial in a single day/week and expectation wise per month or quarter on a intermediate vs. long-term project for two quarters or a year? I think I lack clarity and wonder if I will be as performative or hyper-perform compared to my peers (like I can code fast and even without using a CoPilot, but I wonder about code quality and depth rather than simply throwing something together or fluff commits - a bunch of installfest does not count, obviously).

Assuming code first engineers care deeply about perfecting code while product engineers care deeply about shipping out solutions, how does one put up with an mentor that is a code first engineer to the extreme?

The one engineer on my team is known for being a code first engineer: the type that will ask every lesser ranking engineer for rewrites from every PR, takes a week to review small tickets, prefers to miss deadlines instead of pushing decent code to prod, and will not compromise on design decisions until months have gone by.

Sure, its great to learn from someone with top-notch code quality with past experience at google. I'm also confident my testing skills have improved a LOT since I started. On the other hand, having to rewrite most PRs I produce just to submit work late has destroyed my reputation as a junior engineer on my team. And for the majority of the time my team lead disagrees with this extreme code first mentality so I end up in the middle of arguments on the smallest design choices, waiting for a resolution before picking a solution.

How have you found balance between perfect code and shipping fast?

Code quality makes a lot of sense even on its own. Yet my company is early and a small team with no one specifically dedicated to software engineering. We used to have a software engineer, but they were not a good fit and they no longer work for the company. I have been tasked with code reviews. How can we incorporate documentation well from early stages with technical writing, and how does this best play into code quality?

Recently, I was helping migrate my team’s entire codebase from a legacy Java DateTime library to the newer, built-in Java DateTime library.

I’ve never performed a migration before, so I don’t have context to know whether this kind of migration is typical (my current team isn’t very good). 

Some of the features of the migration:

• The codebase primarily contains poorly written unit tests or tests without assertions (and no E2E or integration tests)

• Consequently, we tested the application by setting up a separate environment, simulating user flows, and manually verifying results inside the DB

• The migration took over a month to perform - meaning constant merge conflicts from new changes to resolve

What might a migration look like at a good tech company? 

In my company (early stage so there is not a formal code standard, this is also not yet production code it is R&D code) the ML code for preprocessing the data is a long list of function calls, ETL, pandas stuff to manipulate, clean, and process the raw data. Then there's obv a ton of other function calls for ML -- split data, remove missing vals, run it thru ML models and call test methods

This makes it hard to write clean code bc

1. There is very little code reuse to make stuff modular
2. In most SWE cases there are increasing layers of abstraction. But here there is no obvious way to abstract away stuff since most of it is a long list of sequential processing code

Things I'm doing

• Breaking into classes (1 for model, 1 for preprocess, 1 for tests, etc...). But even these are just becoming long functions or a python file with 20 functions
• Trying to make the scripts function based so that when I make a function call it is clear what this function is supposed to do

Background

I have joined a new company recently and was tasked with building a Task Management System ( for clients and internal Employees ). So in short this software is going to be re-iterated again and again for improvement after we launch its first MVP ( targeted 2 months at max ).

Scenario

I have come across a use case where I want to handle errors using a custom error handler, its a function to which I pass any error thrown my APIs and based on error type ( error code a reference from prisma docs ) it returns a specific structured error response that can be useful for frontend devs and also help debug better.

Question

Is going this far for handling many errors worth it, i was recently listing to Alex for the Code Quality Course and what i understood its worth it as it would help me and my juniors debug better while in production and local development as well.

Tech Stack

Prisma ORM, Postgres, NextJS

Hi everyone, I recently started as an Engineer at Meta, and my team has a lot of frequent broken, flaky tests. Like every single week a test must break. The End to End Test Wiki is not enough for this. How can I improve the testing system? Are there resources that you recommend? What suggestions do you have for me?

Thank you!

I am working in a project where we have a pipeline which runs automated tests, lint, and other type checks.

But we are merging PRs even if the pipeline fails 😅

On my case, every time I got a pipeline error, I fix it in my PRs, and some of my coworkers are starting doing the same, but still we are merging some PRs with the pipeline failing.

Our manager is a software engineer too, and has the role of merging the PRs.

I tried to convince him to avoid merging PRs if the pipeline is failing, but while he is open to discuss this topic, he thinks that since other teams also need to merge things. He doesn't want to block them because of the pipeline.

More context:

• It is a startup and we want to get the job done faster.
• I have 2 months working there.
• The pipeline was always failing because of another step that was removed recently. I think they got used to ignore the pipeline because of that.

I believe we are paying 10x of the future time, for short term quick time (10 minutes of the future for 1 minute today).

I thing If we continue with this, all will blow up in our faces.

I am tiring of fix the pipeline almost every day, and checking my team PRs as well.

Not sure if I should just keep pushing, or stop worrying if the pipeline passes or not and just see how the things blow up, and then try to convince the team of keep the pipeline passing as a strict requisite to merge a PR.

What would you do in my case?

Background

I have started developing an internal task management system based on server actions. The problem is that server actions cannot run in parallel. At some screens using Parallel routes, I am calling more than one server action, and since they run sequentially, it’s hurting performance.

Question

What would be the best course of action here, I found a library that can be used to run server action in parallel While I was reading somewhere that one should not use server actions for GET requests and only for mutations, based on this I am thinking about going to ‘api’ based routes for GET requests and keep the post requests as server actions. Need advice from seniors here who have worked in NextJs before.

Also having a codebase following two kinds of approaches server action and API routes seems weird to me because as per my limited knowledge plus what Alex taught in his , one should follow one pattern in a codebase so that it stays consistent. Would appreciate the help or any kind of advice here.