I recently hired into a data analytics team for a hospital, and we don’t have a style guide. Lots of frustration from folks working with legacy code…I thought putting together a style guide would help folks working with code they didn’t write, starting with requiring a header for SQL scripts first as low hanging fruit.
Or so I thought.
My counterpart over application development says that we shouldnt be documenting any metadata in-line, and he’d rather implement “docfx” if we want to improve code metadata and documentation. I’m terrified of half-implementing yet another application to further muddy the waters–i’m concerned it will become just one-more place to look while troubleshooting something.
Am I going crazy? I thought code headers were an industry standard, and in-line comments are regarded as practically necessary when working with a larger team…
I work in Data Engineering and have spent most my time on analytics teams. They don’t have a SWE/CS background and generally because of that don’t follow any good programming practices. In my experience style guides are hard to get them to follow properly even if you set up SQLFluff for them., I can barely make them see the advantage of not committing directly to main (at least we’re using git). It’s very frustrating.