Comment by parr0t | Hacker News Reader

Comment by parr0t | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a part time developer that is still at uni but learning the ways of how maintaining code is doing in a professional environment.

Just curious, how often are practices like these where the company you work for gives you a detailed overview of all the coding conventions you should follow? Is this absolutely expected to be followed strictly when you start any job as a developer? Is this something a lot of workplaces follow or mainly the big boys(Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc). If you miss maybe one or two coding conventions in a huge commit for instance, do you hear about it or does the reviewer just fix it and you can see what's changed?

Just curious as I'm still new to transitioning into the workplace when it comes to source control. I work with one other developer (my boss) who wrote for more or less the entire system himself and there is no such document - I just have to observe the patterns used and follow suit.

It's unusual to have style guides, in particular as extensive as this, except at places that have their act together.[1] Where some sort of style is enforced, though, it's typical to have an automated tool that validates your code. This can happen locally (as a pre-commit hook), remotely when you push a branch (as a CI check), or when merging to master (same). If people are going through and noting style guide violations in a code review, that's generally a bad sign.[2]

[1]: This is my opinion. Anecdotally, places with style guides tend to have better engineering cultures.

[2]: Again, opinion. This tends to indicate a weak culture (dictatorial lead or a lack of awareness/ability when it comes to tools) and can produce a negative atmosphere (nit-picking isn't fun).

That's really interesting, first I have heard about automated tools to validate code.

Are there public tools out there you can use prior to commits for this purpose or are they generally done in-house?

The big one for Git is Overcommit[1]. The tools that it runs depend on the language, though. Some are community-driven[2], while others are baked into the language.[3]

[1]: https://github.com/brigade/overcommit

[2]: E.g., flake8 for Python: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/flake8

[3]: E.g., gofmt for Go: https://golang.org/cmd/gofmt/

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