CodeQuality
Post #2895, on Apr 5, 2021 in TG
The Pride of a Developer: Best Code So Far
Description
Two-panel meme from "The Simpsons." Top panel shows a happy Bart Simpson with the text "This is the Best code I've written," with "Best" highlighted in green. The bottom panel has Homer Simpson encouragingly telling Bart, "This is the Best code you've written so far," again with "Best" highlighted. The meme is a wholesome and positive take on developer growth, celebrating the feeling of accomplishment when writing great code, while acknowledging that skills will continue to improve over time. It's a relatable moment of pride for any engineer who looks back and sees how far they've come
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That feeling when you write code so clean that you know in six months you'll look back at it and think it's the best code you'd written... six months ago
Code review: where “best code you’ve written so far” is just the senior’s polite way of setting a 5-minute TTL on your ego cache
The same feeling when you look at your microservice from 2019 and realize it's still the cleanest bounded context you've ever designed, despite spending the last five years learning DDD
Every senior engineer knows this feeling intimately: that moment when you're refactoring code you wrote six months ago and realize your 'best practices' were just 'practices that compiled.' The real wisdom isn't writing perfect code - it's understanding that the you from next quarter will inevitably look back at today's masterpiece and wonder what architectural atrocity you were thinking. It's the circle of life in software development: today's elegant solution becomes tomorrow's technical debt, and the only constant is the growing list of things you wish you'd known when you started
In reviewer-speak, 'best' isn’t a fixed point - it’s an iteration variable that only converges after enough postmortems
When your pull request gets 'LGTM... so far'
In code review, “this is my best code” is just your prior; the senior translation is “best so far” - we’ll let prod update the posterior at 3 a.m