Comment by Timur Barblishvili on "What was the biggest mistake you've made this month?"

CommentWhat was the biggest mistake you've made this month?

Timur Barblishvili

Feb 20, 2019

My biggest mistake this month....is that I still haven’t quit my job 🤪. But actually, I’ve made a mistake of listening to my superior during PR. I had an elegant solution to a particular problem(a bit of a duck 🦆 typing in C# for 2 similar, but not related entities), he said it’s too complex(yeah, fill object’s properties and turn it into a desired type is soooo complex 🤣). Made me rewrite it into a bulk of copy-paste logic, that took 3x more space and looks awful(+ harder to maintain). He said it will cut some logic branching, but it did not at all, it has even increased it....

I know about reducing complexity and all for it, but it just triggers me, when developers complain about ‘complex’ solutions, just because they don’t know the language features and can’t utilize them(even though this feature fits the problem like a glove and was even introduced to solve such problems).

Sorry for the rant 🤭

Mark

Feb 20, 2019

It's hard to balance between using rare but appropriate features that confuse your colleagues, or sticking to the basic functionality but needing much more code.

I also like to think that you should be able to expect colleagues to know the language fairly well. But maybe that's besed too much of Python and Java - it's probably harder to know all the stuff in Ruby or C++.

There has to be a cutoff somewhere though. If you write something that only 1 of your 40 colleagues understands without Google, then it's probably not productive to use it (whether it's your colleagues fault is another matter).

Yeah, I get all that, but still frustrating. It’s all about balance) There were 2 huge DTOs with all the same properties but the name of 1 id(one entity was split into 2), So what I did, is fill an expando object with all the properties, including both ids, and then just call a simple method that created an instance of a generic target type with filled properties from the expando. Then I would just call this method with one of this 2 types as target when I need them. The method is just 4 lines on creating an instance and filling it using for each over expando’s dictionary. That’s it. Maybe it’s just my bias, but to me it’s simple, takes little space and just 1 method. Would appreciate any feedback)

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