Completely agree! It’s SO much easier to lighten the mood and keep things upbeat and productive in an actual conversation vs. just text-based feedback. For example it makes it easy to throw in self-deprecating anecdotes of your own when discussing mistakes / needed changes, which can really help put juniors at ease. It’s just worlds better in >90% of scenarios.
Completely understand the frustration here. Mistakes happen, even competent people sincerely trying to do a good job can overlook things, etc. But if it’s a pattern of just copying and pasting code without really even trying to understand what it does, that’s a big problem that needs to be addressed. And frankly they should feel embarrassed if it happens more than once or twice.
OTOH, delivering criticism in a way that winds up productive for all involved is difficult at best, and the outcome depends on the junior as much as it does the senior. What good is being right if it ultimately just alienates you from your team? Tough situation for sure, and one of the many reasons it’s so important to hire carefully (which is itself a whole huge can of worms too!).
Can you simply ask them to walk through their submission line by line with you, explaining what it’s doing? If you’ve never asked that before it might come across as a strange request, but if you phrase it well it’s possible this causes them to notice their poor understanding without you ever seeming to point it out.
I was simply pleased by your comment, to see how much you care about helping folks and moving the community forward. Seems like quite a lot of effort to me, far more than I’d be able (willing?) to contribute, and I’m just forever grateful for folks you like you and wanted to say something about it :)
I appreciate the invite. I’m not at a point currently where I can put sincere effort toward much that’s non-essential, but if that changes, Rust is on my short list of targets for ways to spend some spare effort and time.
Welp, YOU’RE frickin cool, kudos!
Cool thanks! I haven’t tried it for troubleshooting, I’ll give that a go when I next need it.
Are you using one integrated into your IDE? Or just standalone in a web browser? That’s probably what I ought to try next (the IDE end of things). I saw an acquaintance using PyCharm’s integrated assistant to auto gen commit messages, that looked cool. Not exactly game changing of course.
Do you feel like elaborating any? I’d love to find more uses. So far I’ve mostly found it useful in areas where I’m very unfamiliar. Like I do very little web front end, so when I need to, the option paralysis is gnarly. I’ve found things like Perplexity helpful to allow me to select an approach and get moving quickly. I can spend hours agonizing over those kinds of decisions otherwise, and it’s really poorly spent time.
I’ve also found it useful when trying to answer questions about best practices or comparing approaches. It sorta does the reading and summarizes the points (with links to source material), pretty perfect use case.
So both of those are essentially “interactive text summarization” use cases - my third is as a syntax helper, again in things I don’t work with often. If I’m having a brain fart and just can’t quite remember the ternary operator syntax in that one language I never use…etc. That one’s a bit less impactful but can still be faster than manually inspecting docs, especially if the docs are bad or hard to use.
With that said I use these things less than once a week on average. Possible that’s just down to my own pre-existing habits more than anything else though.
Excellent work, and thank you for sharing. What a win! I’m always heartened to hear about straightforward open source wins against leeches 👍
Thanks for this, really enjoyed it :)
Hey, thanks, that’s a useful (and probably fairly accurate) distinction and I’m happy to find that a positive shift in my viewpoint, if minor. The corruption might be a really big problem or it might be one guy who’s an aberration for being wildly outside the court’s norms, really unclear on that part. But I needed a solid reminder that it’s not quite yet another ruined and hypocritical institution we once held dear.
Ugh, poor error reporting is such a frustrating time sink.