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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • A simple website to show if it matters to you is this one (ideally check it on a screen with more than 60hz):

    https://www.testufo.com/

    Everyone’s perception is different, I’ve met someone who couldn’t tell the UFOs apart past 30 fps. They also didn’t like shooters/action games much, probably because following fast movements was difficult for them.

    But I think the vast majority of people easily notice the difference between 30 and 60. And 60 to 120 should also be possible notice for most. As for me, I used to play Quake 3 a lot and back then that was played on 120 or even 240hz CRTs. The first flat screens with slow reaction times and 60hz max were quite a step down.

    While I don’t really like linus tech tips, they did some nice testing on the topic and came to the conclusion that more fps is measurably better for shooters, even if the refresh rate can’t keep up.


  • I’ve been on-call in 3 of my past jobs in Germany, most of it was pretty similar, 1 week per person, 600-800€ per week and some extra pay on incidents. Current job:

    1. ~500€ for a week and I get an extra day off after each week on-call, but no extra pay for incidents
    2. With the extra day off it’s really nice. Our team is light on incidents too.
    3. Not much past that. The standard German worker protection laws would apply, but pushing those would not help me much and it might not be the best career move.
    4. 5 others
    5. EU


  • Good questions, I could probably write a lot, but I’ll try to keep it short. I usually apply TDD and there are different schools of thought within it about how to structure the development process. But no matter how exactly you do it, if you focus on writing the tests while writing your code, you won’t end up with an application that you then have to figure out how to test.

    what to test

    Well, what is the application supposed do? That is what you test, the behaviour of the application.

    So in a codebase without any tests, the first thing you should write a test for is the happy path. That will probably not be a unit test. So for the web server example, set it up in a test with a file, start it and check if it serves that file.

    Then you can add tests for all the error cases and for additional functionality. You can write unit tests for individual components. The ideal places to test are interfaces with clear boundaries. Ideally you should not have to look at the code of a method to be able to write a test for it. In reality that’s not always so easy, especially in existing code bases, but if you have to set up more than one mock, it tends to lead to brittle tests.

    Every time you encounter a bug/issue, reproduce it in a test first. And do measure code coverage, but don’t make it a target, just check for places that are lacking.




  • Nice, so they are hot takes :D

    If the design of a code change is bad, noticing that in the PR stage is not desirable. It should be discussed before someone actually went ahead and implemented it. It can also happen if people misunderstand the architecture, but again, that should be cleared up before actually implementing a change. Code style should be enforced automatically, as should test coverage and performance. Code review is also pretty bad at finding bugs from my experience. That imo leaves very few things where code review is useful that are not nitpicking.

    As for programming languages, the amount does matter for individuals and for teams/organisations. A developer who can only use a single language is not very good, and using a many different languages within the same team is not good either.


  • Even better is to ship small increments often.

    Unfortunately in many organisations, leadership doesn’t really understand that instead of reducing quality, scope should be reduced in order to ship faster. And developers rarely have a say in these things.

    While I agree that it can be considered a hot take industry wide, I don’t think for most devs that is a hot take, the ones whom I’ve seen ship broken stuff were rushed on tight deadlines and didn’t have the experience/motivation/political capital to fight back on deadlines.