u/Antique_Target3076

Another "is this normal/common?" post.

I work in a Python/JS team developing internal tools that other teams use. Some of these are quite critical.

Some of these critical tools depend on just a single person. No one else has contributed to or reviewed the code. They work most of the time, which is certainly a credit to the maintainers.

However, things break (inevitably). And sometimes they break when their sole maintainers are unavailable, making things difficult for the users and the rest of us trying hopelessly to hotfix things without enough information.

I've repeatedly told management and the PO that each repo needs to have at least 4 eyes on them. They shrug and agree, but never enforce any incentives or rules regarding code review and/or number of maintainers. I suspect they think that AI will come along soon enough to deliver us from the evil of bugs.

What do I do? In my view the management here is just asleep at the wheel. They don't have a tech background, so maybe they don't know how problematic this can be. But I don't quite buy this excuse: it's >!@#?!-ing!< obvious that you should not have single points of failure in your system.

Anyone here with experience in a similar situation, or can relate to my frustration/alarm?

I really like American TV shows - and I was looking up the most watched show episodes in history. I see that the finale of MASH is far and away the highest viewed broadcast among TV series. The only broadcasts with comparable viewerships are Super Bowls.

What was so special about MASH? Is it because there were fewer other options back then? Or the show was a cultural phenomenon unlike anything that came after it?

I haven't seen MASH, so I'd also love to hear from people who've watched the show. Does it still hold up?

Background

I started my Python journey roughly 4 years ago; when I was locked into a low-paying job with no prospects and looking for a way out. The hard work did pay off, and a few months later I landed what a tech job.

The first few months were rough, and there was a lot to learn. 3 years later, I felt like I was hitting my stride: Python started feeling like a native language. Never mind decorators and list comprehensions, I was making my way through asyncio and descriptor protocols. I was squashing more bugs than Mortein, and make more features than Karan Johar :P

Story

Cut to last week. I picked up a refactoring project to prepare an app for some upscaling. I thought it would be smooth sailing; but it was brutally painstaking, difficult work. My confidence was a little shaken.

In hindsight (refactoring nearing completion), I see that most of my time was spent in trying to decide about the new architecture of the app. What should the different components be? Where do you draw the line between separation-of-concerns and simplicity? What is more testable? Readable? Lowest latency?

Takeaway

Working on this tough refactoring really helped me develop a personal sense of what is good, scalable design. This sense/judgement, I realise, can only be developed through experience. It is what separates juniors from seniors. If you ever read an important PEP or Guido's newsletters, pay attention to how easily and clearly they are able to justify their choices, e.g. for f-strings, against labelled loops, etc.

With the rise of LLM-assisted programming, I feel like it's easier than ever to leapfrog over this kind of design-level thinking and just have code that somehow works. Consequently, one might never develop judgement or taste or clarity when it comes to designing software. It stunts growth.

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TL;DR: Experience helps us become better coders/engineers by helping us hone our judgement. By using too much AI, we may never exercise that muscle and remain prompters.

Genuinely curious what y'all think, especially senior devs?

Edit: Formatting.