William

I’m gonna create a new character called William because I have a good feeling he will be a good source of stories, so don’t want to group his stories with Colin.

There was a time I was looking through the recent changes to our software and I saw someone had added some additional error logging. When people have done this in the past, its because there is a bug they cannot recreate, so they need to add additional logging code to gather extra information in order to diagnose the issue.

Anyway, I look at the code and realise that what they were logging wouldn’t be helpful at all. I asked the developer what he hoped to achieve and he said “William told me to do it.” So I was like “If William asked you to jump off a cliff would you do it?“. He replied “But William is a Senior“. I was like “so what? you need to consider things for yourself“.

Recently, William has got involved in our project and has been trying to help decide how to approach our architecture.

We were discussing how users could be updated with real-time changes to data. William stated we couldn’t use SignalR. I asked why and he gave me a shocked look as if it was obvious. “It doesn’t work with web browsers” he said. Weird, I thought, because a partner product uses SignalR for their website.

SignalR supports “server push” functionality, in which server code can call out to client code in the browser using Remote Procedure Calls (RPC), rather than the request-response model common on the web today.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/signalr/overview/getting-started/introduction-to-signalr

I was looking into a solution involving Web Sockets and he came over and told me it has been ruled out because it is limited to 1 million connections. I was like “1 million connections? How many do we need?“. He was like “we need to think bigger than that, Websockets isn’t scalable“.

I asked around to get an idea of our current userbase. Turns out we have ~180,000 users, but around half will be active at any one time. So even if we did scale it up, 1 million is more than enough. I was speaking to one of the Architects and he reckoned that the 1 milllion limit can be surpassed with certain implementations.

Anyway, it got me thinking that maybe you shouldn’t always assume people know what they are talking about. William states things with such confidence that it sounds like he knows what he is doing, but really; it’s just the first idea that popped into his head.

“As a junior developer, hearing others say “I don’t know” is extremely reassuring and erases the common misconception that experienced developers know the answer to every question, and have a solution in the back of their mind for every type of problem. Admitting you don’t know something is nothing to be embarrassed of — instead, it’s a new learning opportunity for everyone involved! It may even lead to another occasion to pair programming or debug a problem together”

https://dev.to/httpspauline/5-ways-to-create-a-junior-developer-friendly-culture-3n4

So if William admitted that he needed to do some research, we could have investigated various messaging technologies.

Without me questioning his statements, we could have rejected two perfectly viable options.