Amy Blankenship
1 min readDec 12, 2023

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I accept that most people write poor quality code most of the time. And I haven't had great results with getting that addressed by calling it out. It's more likely to put me at odds with the team, if I'm lucky, which then means it's harder for me to do my job, If I'm not lucky, I get fired, which makes it impossible.

So instead I strive for incremental improvement I might write code templates that write code they often make mistakes on for them, so they can at least see what that kind of code looks like and gain experience using it (part of the problem with most teams is they have literally never seen, imagined, or worked with good code). I also tend to advocate for TDD, because having to think through the problem in steps makes people better developers if they can be brought around to actually writing the test first. I also give real code reviews rather than just rubber stamping, which often is a culture shock in a team that has never had it. There are ways to improve a culture other than calling out the existing team, and I find those to be more effective. I also recognize that if I had different personal characteristics, such as the ability to grow facial hair, I might have a different lived experience.

Also, don't you have a team calendar? Why do you think people can look at the board to know what everyone is working on, but they can't use a team calendar?

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Amy Blankenship
Amy Blankenship

Written by Amy Blankenship

Full Stack developer at fintech company. I mainly write about React, Javascript, Typescript, and testing.

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