The synchronization problem (flakiness and all the waits) is tricky to get right. Browsers are concurrent systems, and programming around one is specialized enough that many devs don’t do it well, e.g. IMO if you’re adding ad-hoc waits or nesting timeouts, you’ve already lost.

Good code is code that’s easy to delete.

I’m not a game dev, but it’s got a reputation for being more of a software engineering shit show than other software industries, which your story only reinforces.

Fine for prototyping, but adds a scaling tech debt “time bomb” for a live system. Those associations had better be really sparse.

So… a polymorphic many-to-many join table?

One of the best use cases is implementing abstract data types and hiding the memory management and other potentially unsafe optimization tricks behind a clean and high level abstraction.

Also since it’s a logical/mathematical construct and not attempting to model the real world (like business logic), it’s one case where inheritance hierarchies will remain stable.

I feel a lot of advice here is trying to push the learning envelope without considering fun & the learning experience. This is for an 8 yr old, and I’m seeing suggestions that would seriously challenge high schoolers, college students, and even some software engineers in industry I’ve encountered.

For the software aspects of programming, I would suggest looking at programming(-esque) games and web browser programming environments. Here’s a solid short list, vaguely sorted from “proramming-esque” to “actual programming”:

• https://upperstory.com/turingtumble/ - A physical algorithmic marble and lever puzzle “board game”. Great (and designed for?) for kids. Not programming.
• Factorio - A factory-building game that “feels” a lot like software development. Not programming.
• Opus Magnum - mechanical puzzle game by Zachtronics, build algorithmic “molecule-building machines”. Not programming.
• <Any other game by Zachtronics> - varies from “not-programming” to “contains programming”. Can get pretty difficult sometimes.
• Human Resource Machine - Programming puzzle game using assembly-like language. Later stages are challenging.
• 7 Billion Humans - “sequel” to Human Resource Machine, more featureful language, has concurrency and randomness. Later stages are challenging.
• https://www.hedycode.com/ - An innovative learning programming lang and “levels” method that makes Scratch primitive by comparison. Has free online lesson plan & environment. Hedy level 18 is vanilla Python.
• https://www.codecademy.com/ - you said you’re using this already

Suggestions to go physical tinkering with electronics is good, but I’m unable to make good suggestions there.

A real computer and coding environment/shell could be good for system admin skills, but the learning curve is steep. You’ll also have to be okay with letting him accidentally brick the computer (best way to learn!).

Disagree with Docker and git at this stage of learning. This is an 8yr old playing with scratch, Minecraft, and early levels of CodeAcademy.

The answer to “not dealing with environment” isn’t Docker, it’s a programming(-esque) game or an in-browser environment.

IMO okay advice for specific types of issues, but way too prescriptive to work well generally.

Steps 3-4-5 are good, and breaking it down like that could be helpful to readers, but in my mind, it should be so well practiced and executed so naturally that it feels like a single step. I also think there ought to have been a mention of the fast iterative experimentation where 3-4-5 is repeated.

Break the build (and block other devs)? Is this a 1-team company?

Write a test first? Maybe, if you’ve already got a well isolated, somewhat understood problem whose solution won’t require deeper restructuring.

Immediately “Brainstorm as many hypotheses … as you can think of”? Inefficient if you already have a good idea of what’s wrong (wasting time guessing), and also inefficient if you have absolutely no idea what’s wrong (wasting time with uneducated guesses).

Ooh yeah PR as patches, persistent despite rebases, would be nice.

Many git operations fundamentally have three SHAs as parameters (tree operations after all), and GitHub’s model simplifies it down to two.

Unfortunately it’s uncommon now that GitHub’s PR workflow dominates, so people think in terms of (often squashed) PRs and talk about “stacking PRs”. At least GitHub supports viewing PRs commit by commit.

If PRs are just how it’s going to be, I wish GitHub could auto cut stacked PRs from a linear branch of commits.

If you were reviewing a “non-trivial” PR from me, I’d recommend not squashing because I would’ve broken it up into readable atomic commits.

Seems more applicable to an imperative style, and IMO even still the advice is too dependent on special/actual case details to be generally applicable as a “rule of thumb”.

This is just one specific example amongst many of how redundant logic could be simplified because sometimes the branch is an implementation detail and you want to push it down, and sometimes it’s not and you want to push it up.

Just the commonly repeated mediocre rules-of-thumb-you-should-follow (but not always) stuff.

Yeah, the article’s takeaways are of little substance and perhaps even misguided

WET/DRY-ness is like a property of code – a metric or smell perhaps, but not something to goal towards. That’s like asking whether you drive fast or slow and whether we should all drive faster or slower.