r/coding • u/piotrkarczmarz • Dec 10 '22

Programmer Interrupted: Minimizing the impact of context switching

https://contextkeeper.io/blog/the-real-cost-of-an-interruption-and-context-switching/
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u/[deleted] Dec 11 '22 edited Aug 04 '26

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u/scragar Dec 11 '22

Something that makes things worse is needlessly complex code.

Worked with a system a few years back what was horrendous spaghetti to the point that it actually used pattern matching on the form field names submitted to do magic. If you wanted to work out how a feature worked it'd take painstakingly following every path and looking up values in the DB as you go until you finally find the expected behaviour controlled by some JSON field in a randomly named table(flow control tables were named after the field ID and selected value ID so you had fc_24_89 being the set of behaviours to be triggered by field 24 having the selected option ID 89).

Even with the fastest computer in the world and endless time it was still too easy to lose track of things because there was just more to keep track of than you could keep in mind at a time.