What good programmers worry about (News)

What up, nerds? I'm Jerod and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, August 26th, 2024. Waymo is really taking off in SF, but residents in the *South of Market* community wish they'd take off altogether. Instead, a bunch of Waymo cars are gathering in a parking lot and honking at each other into the wee hours of the morning. [Seriously](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGwVnVr9y2Y). After much negative social media (and eventually press) coverage, the company stated they know about the issue and are working on a fix. Much love to the dev who pulls *that* Jira ticket... Ok, let's get into the news.

[What good programmers worry about](https://read.engineerscodex.com/p/good-programmers-worry-about-data) Leonardo Creed pulls together some wisdom from Linus Torvalds, who said: > Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships. plus _The Art of Unix Programming_, which said: > Data is more tractable than program logic. It follows that where you see a choice between complexity in data structures and complexity in code, choose the former. More: in evolving a design, you should actively seek ways to shift complexity from code to data. To suggest the following: > Start with the data. Try to reduce code complexity through stricter types on your interfaces or databases. Spend extra time thinking through the data structures ahead of time. This advice also comes from Leonardo's own experience: > I once worked on a project where we spent quite a while optimizing complex algorithms, only to realize that by restructuring our data, we could eliminate entire classes of problems. We replaced a 500-line function with a 50-line function and a well-designed data structure. Not only was the new code faster, but it was also much easier to understand and maintain. In politics, James Carville famously [hung a sign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid) on Bill Clinton's wall that said, "The economy, stupid." Because that's what _really_ mattered the most to get Clinton elected. In software systems, we may need to hang a sign that says, "The data, stupid."

[Toasts are bad UX ](https://maxschmitt.me/posts/toasts-bad-ux) Max Schmitt makes the argument that toast notifications create a bad user experience. What are toasts? One good definition I found [says](https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/12000): > A Toast is a non modal, unobtrusive window element used to display brief, auto-expiring windows of information to a user. Sounds right to me. Why doesn't Max like them? > The core problem is that toasts always show up far away from the user's attention. Sounds right to me. He goes on to give a couple of examples and how he'd redesign the interaction so it doesn't need a toast notification.

[ChartDB is a web-based database diagramming editor](https://github.com/chartdb/chartdb) What's cool about this open source, self-hostable web app is its instant schema import: > Run a single query to instantly retrieve your database schema as JSON. This makes it incredibly fast to visualize your database schema, whether for documentation, team discussions, or simply understanding your data better. They give you a "magic query" that you take and run in your database (Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, etc.) and then paste the resulting JSON into ChartDB for it to visualize. From there you can use the interactive editor to fine-tune the schema. It also looks really nice. Image in your chapter data and the newsletter.

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[Code review anti-patterns](https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/quasiblog/code-review-antipatterns/) Simon Tatham: > When a code reviewer turns to the dark side, they have a huge choice of ways to obstruct or delay improvements to the code, to annoy patch authors or discourage them completely, or to pursue other goals of their own. > > If you’ve only recently turned to the dark side, you might not have thought of all the possibilities yet. So here’s a list of code-review antipatterns, for the dark-side code reviewer who’s running out of ideas. I love how Simon named each anti-pattern so it'll be easy to identify and discuss with others. These names are great: - The Ransom Note - The Double Team - The Catch-22 - The Flip Flop You can almost imagine what each of these means in the context of code review, even without reading the explanations. But you should still read the explanations. They are so good/bad. For example, The Priority Inversion: > In your first code review passes, pick small and simple nits. Variable names are a bit unclear; comments have typos in. > > Wait for the developer to fix those, and then drop your bombshell: there’s a much more fundamental problem with the patch, that needs a chunk of it to be completely rewritten – which means throwing away a lot of the nitpick fixes you’ve already made the developer do in that part of the patch. > > Nothing says ‘your work is not wanted, and your time is not valued’ better than making someone do a lot of work and then making them throw it away. This might be enough to make the developer give up, all by itself.

[Flow state confirmed by scientists](https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jul/20/flow-state-science-creativity-psychology-focus) We all know that feeling when total absorption in an activity makes the rest of the world disappear (and all its troubles with it), but did you know scientists have been studying it for years? > The late Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who first coined the term flow, went as far as to call it “the secret to happiness”... > > Contrary to the assumption that we are happiest while resting, he found that the peaks often involved very high levels of mental focus. The specific activity did not seem to matter – it could be swimming, playing the violin or performing brain surgery. What counted was the feeling of immersion and mastery. I'd argue that the reason many of us enjoy programming computers is because it's an activity that easily evokes a flow state. The world-melting result of immersion coupled with the eventual feeling of mastery is [a hell of a drug](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cocaine-is-a-hell-of-a-drug). The linked article dives into some of the psychology and (attempted) scientific study of flow state. While scientists have confirmed that it's a very real phenomenon, what causes it and how to achieve it have been harder for them to nail down. Maybe put down the petri dish and pick up a code editor... 😉

That's the news for now, but also scan the companion newsletter for even more stories worth your attention: such as, a tool that lets you execute commands on a server by sending UDP packets, a blog post titled You are NOT dumb, you just lack the prerequisites, and a network called Nomad for building private and resilient communications platforms. If you don't get our Changelog Newsletter in your inbox each Monday, fix that bug at changelog.com/news We have some awesome episodes coming up this week: On Wednesday: Ryan Worl from [WarpStream](https://www.warpstream.com) and on Friday, The [#define](https://changelog.com/friends/47) legend continues.. Have a great week! Leave us a 5-star review if you dig our work, and I'll talk to you again real soon.