Keeping Your Codebase Clean - Tidy First? by Kent Beck

[@carl2488]

Really enjoying this guys. You both have enjoyable voices to listen to. Maybe tiny bit of fat could be trimmed out in places with some rambling but so interesting and useful to have these concepts in the book discussed (as a maybe-intermediate programmer)...

[@mudshark5393]

I really liked Tidy First? It felt like Kent took the time to boil everything down to its core.

[@Some_Guy_87]

The name is pronounced "Gergey", like "Sergey" basically - he actually pronounces it on his LinkedIn for reference in the next episode :D. You guys seemed pretty exhausted, I hope you give yourselves some rest as well! Having just started Refactoring, this one's probably not for me - Nevertheless, the core lesson it seems to have really resonated with me. I've worked for almost 10 years in Startup situations where speed was all that mattered. Now many of these things haunt us, and reading about "proper engineering", I'm quick to dive into the other extreme, thinking "What did I do all those years?". But the additional time investment for these approaches is huge, I probably need at least 3x as much time for everything. We simply didn't have that time. Definitely makes sense to sometimes re-consider if task x is really the right one to start a big refactoring tour. Looking forward to your thoughts on the next one, as it's the first one I've read beforehand :D. It has TONS of topics that are just quickly handled, so probably a lot of room for "I once had a situation in this little startup" anecdotes.

[@BookOverflowPod]

Haha, it’s been a busy couple of weeks for the both of us. Luckily, we’ve built a nice break into December! We’ll release a few special episodes that aren’t discussions of new books and then go dark for two weeks.

[@rad_cheed]

I am a current student and curious what classes you guys took at GT.

[@nathantoups]

I graduated May of 2024 and my focus was in Computing Systems. You can probably guess the courses I took that where in foundations (Graduate Algorithms, Databases, Networks) but I also took a decent amount of CyberSecurity track courses like Applied Cryptography (my favorite course in the program other than Graduate Algorithms). I mostly balanced requirements with classes that looked interesting to me.

[@timothyhoytbsme]

My method: I add some code until it works, tidy it up, repeat. Then once I have 20000 lines I realize I need to multithread and rewrite the whole thing.