Good software engineering practices

Source: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Oct/1/software-engineering-practices/#create-test-data

1. Documentation in the same repo as the code
2. Mechanisms for creating test data
   • One way to handle this is to provide tooling to import production data into local environments. This has privacy and security implications—what if a developer laptop gets stolen that happens to have a copy of your largest customer’s data?
   • A better approach is to have a robust system in place for generating test data, that covers a variety of different scenarios.
3. Rock solid database migrations
   • I think we’re pretty decent at this.
   • The article suggests gh-ost which is something that I think we’ve explored already.
4. Templates for new projects
5. Automated code formatting
6. Tested, automated process for new development environments
   • I think people have been exploring Docker, but we haven’t made any progress on this yet.
7. Automated preview environments
   • Reviewing a PR is easier if you can try the changes

Related: Go For Big Wins Rather Than Small Improvements 202210031316

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uid: 202212101811 tags: #insights #software-engineering

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