Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

It’s possible there are things you are still learning, or context you are missing.

You sound still early career enough that the years will likely mellow you out and teach you to better appreciate the ups and downs of building things fast.

You know what’s worse than no abstractions? The wrong abstractions.




Oh c'mon graybeard, you can't honestly be defending 1500 line components right now can you? It's not even a matter of abstraction choice, it's a matter of simple hygiene.

You know what's worse than the wrong abstractions? Copy and pasting your inline-styled div with a zIndex of 99,999 for the fifth modal in a row because you can't be assed to write a damned display component in anticipation of the next time you'll need to put a Modal together.


No pushback here, I’m moreso suggesting that length is not intrinsically the enemy. I would much rather be debugging or wrangling a long functional component with duplication than a messed up or poor abstraction that’s leaked out elsewhere in the codebase.

Levels to it all. Keep track of painful modules and have strong intent to fix them. Prioritization is a mf.


Not the OP but also a full stack at my five year career mark and your last point was an appreciated reminder.

I dread cleaning up solutions that I designed earlier where with hindsight, I made a lot of wrong assumptions. I still make wrong assumptions today, they are just designed less brittle.


You are right on the value of building things fast.

However one thing I have learnt is more coupled the code is with no or poor incomplete abstractions less likely anyone is going to change it.

In the interest of shipping fast I would rather have some abstraction today rather than none, simply because nobody fixes spaghetti code which is already working.

Building new things start slowing down more and mode and you end up taking weeks for what should have been an afternoon's effort .

There are no right answers, however sometimes wrong abstractions can be marginally better than none.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: