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by mtippett 1835 days ago
I actually see just as in a lot of cases as being as a painful indication of a gross trivialization of something.

I regularly call out engineers when they say "just", in a lot of cases when I say - can you explain "just" they go and pull out their collection of familiarity and understanding. To which I usually ask - "How much of your understanding will the reader have?".

When I ask them to remove the just, suddenly a single word becomes a couple of sentences that expand the "just". Magically something trivialized becomes described.

1 comments

Encountering a “just” triggers my fight or flight response. I often interpret is as something that author has done so many times they have internalised it, regardless of the complexity of the task. It also probably isn’t documented with something more than a deprecated code snippet.