this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Can you describe a situation that underscores this issue as I am not seeing it, but maybe I experience it and do not even realize.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Situation: You're building some software to display emojis based on user input.

Current code: when user types "happy", output ๐Ÿ™‚

  • Your new requirement: when user types "happy", output ๐Ÿ˜ƒ instead of ๐Ÿ™‚
  • Coworker's new requirement: when user types "sad", output ๐Ÿ˜ญ

You implement your change, back it up, and the new version with ๐Ÿ˜€ is released. But it turns out ๐Ÿ˜ƒ is the ultimate insult in the Snowflake region, and you need to immediately rollback ๐Ÿ˜ƒ back to ๐Ÿ™‚ while you find an alternative.

Meanwhile, Coworker has added ๐Ÿ˜ญ to your backup, which still has ๐Ÿ˜ƒ. Now when you try to rollback to ๐Ÿ™‚, Coworker's code gets erased. Now your code is unable to safely support both ๐Ÿ˜ญ with ๐Ÿ™‚ without starting over entirely. Maybe you want to disable ๐Ÿ˜€ only for the Snowflake region, but that's not possible either without harding coding the regions instead of just changing the deployment.

Now imagine working with a team of 10 people, or a company with 100 people working on this same software. With features and release dates constantly changing.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I would agree with more people these tools become more needed, but I am talking about a solo dev situation who is the only person who accesses the code base. All other contributors I carefully import.