You're doing it wrong culture
Tags: devculture
Published: 2019-03-19 04:27:32

---
title: You're doing it wrong culture
published: true
description: Not sure why you’ve dragged up a 7 month old conversation, but your build process should be the same across all environments.
tags: devculture
---

> Not sure why you’ve dragged up a 7 month old conversation, but your build process should be the same across all environments.
>
> Gulp is for building front-end assets (CSS, JavaScript), the paths of which shouldn’t change across environments.

I hopped onto a forum to ask a question and noticed I had an unread notification...from two years ago. I read it and was sort of caught in a limbo of responses.

Part of me was thinking of starting a response with, "Well, if you think 7 months is bad, try two years later. Listen here..." 

That's the angry, taking it personal side. To the point of the argument, I was searching on something related to something I was developing that was similar. I wanted to have one set of gulp scripts that could manage the assets for three or four *different* sites; therefore, each one had their own .env file and variables. 

But that's not the point.

I do tend to agree that the build process should be the same across environments: local, testing (if you have one), staging (if you have one), and production. However, the environment variables within a .env file (or other config file) should *not* be the same, especially if, like in Laravel, there's an app key unique to the site.

The Gulp thing is interesting, it reminds me of a lot of other things. Cars, for example, are for getting from point A to point B in an efficient manner compared to the alternative of walking or using a horse and requiring less daily maintenance than either. However, someone decided to break that rule and have cars go in circles, at high speeds (inefficient), for the purposes of entertainment; multi-million dollar industry. Gulp, near as I can tell, is for manipulating and watching the file system; copy-paste files, compile files, and so on.

With that said, what's with us?

Why does it seem like on Stack and various other forums that our first response to any question is:

1. Why do you want to do that thing?
2. You shouldn't do that thing?
3. You're doing it wrong? Here's the right way.

I don't know if it's the quantity necessarily, it's just the quality. My stock response has become something like:

> Not sure this "you're doing it wrong" answer is helpful.

I've seen a few people who say, "I don't recommend doing it this way but it's the way you say you want to and here's why it's a bad idea."

That^ is so much better than coming off as demeaning and confrontational. And this isn't about thin skin - I was an art major and for four years straight was subjected to a jury of my peers for everything I created (like a code review with the whole team, only other students are competition). I literally had someone yelling in my face, "I don't understand your stuff, I mean, seriously, why are you even an art major" (that was a fellow student, while the professor sat on the sidelines saying nothing). So, yeah, thick skin, and I can dish what I'm served.

But I don't want to when it's berating and destructive criticism.

And that's the rub. I'm not looking for flowers, rainbows, and campfire singalongs. But maybe entering into the conversation with the notion that the other person *isn't* intentionally trying to be an asshole and does know a thing or two, just maybe not on that particular subject. 

Maybe my phrasing seemed confrontational and the other person felt the need to escalate instead of asking for clarification like, "Text being the absolute *worst* form of communication, I would like clarification, are you being aggressive right now? Because X, Y, Z makes me think you are." Or even, "This feels like an aggressive trap laying."

Anyway. Just something that always hits me hard when I see it because I've seen what happens when we're being awesome to and with each other - the alternative is sheer terror.