Hi! This is A Minute Of Overpass. My name is Eric, and I make apps. Now this week I
wanna talk about "Why You Should Take Ownership Of Your Code".
Okay, so this week I had to make a few changes to an app that I outsource.
So if you know anything about me, I do a lot of coding myself but when
possible I don't wanna do the coding. So I am a very expensive app developer
may be expensive developer, so when I get an app done, I'll try to find the best
way to do it. A lot of times, it is having a really good coding standards, making
sure you give it to somebody who do a really good job with it, and just a sort of
handing it off and then also keeping on top of that, so having like daily GIT
repository down check-ins, and stuff like that, just to get stay on top of the project but
sometimes you don't, you can't stay on top of the project. I have some apps from
the early days that I... that I wasn't all that on top of everybody I thought I'd
really don't want to annoy them. They seem to be getting on really well, and
then you get the app, get the code back and you and everything seems to be
working behind the phone but the code looks like... like vomit. You know what I mean,
it's awful, right?. So it's kinda cool when you don't wanna go through and
touch because somehow it was working and you know and you know, it's just
variables are named bad and all this kind of stuff, which if you're not a developer
you should still get the code back from your developers, so like if you're
just like somebody who's not a developer, right? So you've hired some developers and
they're coding the app for you and then they've released it and you're like
may be happy with it or maybe not happy with it, but you should get the code back
from that should be part of your contract. When you negotiate a contract
with an outsourced provider you need to make sure that you have access to the
code. Now, I always say that I like to have access to the code...to the code
throughout, but a lot of times it's a fixed price they don't wanna do that
because that takes all their power away. You could just take the code compile it
and do whatever so they...they would rather you know if you're paying
at the end and they will give you the full code at the end which is fine, but
however, you should get at...you should get the code and you should be able to tweak
that code yourself. Now, one of the things and this is what I've been doing this
week is working on one of those older projects and adding a few
changes to it, and the code is really bad, and a lot of times it's just it's
taking ownership of it, and it was so difficult to do because everything's
kind of all over the place that I yeah I was tempted to go back to that developer
and just say "Hey, can you make these changes for me?", because he could probably
do it quickly because he knows all the code because he's the, you know, he's the
diabolical guy who did it all, right?, so however, what makes more sense is to
actually put in those hours and take ownership of the code, that way you...
when you make small changes you...you're not beholden to this outsource company or to
this developer. I mean there's so many things that are just simple changes like
I wanna change the background color of a form, or I wanna change a label on it. I
wanna add a new field to a form, or something like that, which is stuff that you should be able
to do, but it's sometimes a code is just so bad that you can't do that. So, I mean
when you're...when you're inspecting out a project, one of the things to make sure
is that you have some sort of instructions on how. If I was going to do
X Y and Z, I want some documentation on how to do that. I wanna make sure that
every class has at least a little bit of documentation saying what it's for and.
Documentation and software is like, you know, it's very rare. I mean it's
on big large expensive projects there's lots of documentation but on small
outsourced project there's usually not much. So anyway, my message this week is to...
if you have one of these projects that you've outsourced to somebody else and his
comeback is to take ownership of that code is to not...is to not rely
on that third party. Sometimes, it means going to another developer. Now, I've done
this before, and every single time, I mean I've taken my...like one of my projects which I
think, Oh this is just terrible. I wish you know, I wish I"ve never gone with that first developer.
I'm gonna go to a new developer, and just get them to make a few changes and
they always say the same thing. There was this "Oh Eric, we need to rewrite this from scratch!", right? which like...
No, actually you don't, and so you spend up...you end up spending a few days just
tweaking code in and digging in and trying to find the places that need to
be changed, because
every developer will tell you they want to start from scratch, every right from
scratch.
Sometimes, it's necessary but not nearly as often as...as people think. So my
message this week is...Take ownership of your code! That's it. I hope you've enjoyed it.
I'll talk to you next week. Okay, goodbye!
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that's it. I'll talk to you next week.