“Not everything worth doing is worth doing well.”
— Tom West, quoted by Tracy Kidder in The Soul of a New Machine (Modern Library, 1997). ISBN 0-679-60261-5
Previously cited on HN, but it’s a classic quote so worth citing again.
Who wrote this shit?
71–80 of 300 posts
Re: Who wrote this shit?
#72It was me ... several times I have found a bug or code smell and then been surprised that the I was the original author. For the last fifteen to twenty years, I've generally found looking at code I wrote six months ago equally distasteful. So now my default behavior is to assume the code met the business function at the time, acknowledge that I'm continuously improving in my craft and finally, gained a joy in spendin…
I'm a strong believer in continuous refactoring. Improve existing code when you touch it. Defer architectural choices untill the moment you have enough info. And leave cleaning up to the moment that it starts becoming messy, not before.
That implies, code never is perfect. Not even good. But clunky, cobbled together, expermental or just plain stupid. But always just about 'good enough' to solve the issue at hand.
Re: Who wrote this shit?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I loved those moments, the work was done, you moved on, and they came with all the ammunition they collected to wiggle out of payments. The trick is to give them easily defuseable bad ammunition when they "sneak" around to collect. If you disassemble all their arguments and have emails were they were informed, you can trash them thoroughly. Unpayed though. Cause even good arguments cant help broke little shops.
Small claims court. It’s not acceptable to not pay people accordingly.
I talked to a lawyer, and it just wasn't worth going after them for this amount. I wrote it off as a valuable lesson and went to make more money elsewhere.
Re: Who wrote this shit?
#74My favourite is when you're a solopreneur working in your own repos and still asking yourself "who wrote this shit?!"
Yup lol that’s what teaches me that you need to do test driven development.
Re: Who wrote this shit?
#75My favourite is when you're a solopreneur working in your own repos and still asking yourself "who wrote this shit?!"
I heard a saying once: "all developers should be embarrassed about code they wrote more than a year ago" as a (cheeky) measure of ongoing growth and development. :-)
I've seriously considered removing some of the older semi-popular projects from my github solely because I would be embarrassed to show them to a prospective employer, or even other developers.
In the end I think it's actually kind of fun to look back through the code though, and think "surely I should have known about X back then... Why didn't I just do that instead."
Re: Who wrote this shit?
#76The best thing is when you replace some shitty code with your own wonderful well-architected code…which causes a bug.
Re: Who wrote this shit?
#77Did this in a startup, turned out to be the CEO's code and he was not happy. Not everyone understands the traditions.
I sometimes call out my CFO at my company who still works on the codebase(very Spaghettis like).
He is not a trained programmer but his code runs the company and we are the leaders in our industry. He apologises for his older work but without it I guess the company may not have existed in it current form.
The also board thinks the codebase is a potential liability since it all Coldfusion.
Re: Who wrote this shit?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I heard a saying once: "all developers should be embarrassed about code they wrote more than a year ago" as a (cheeky) measure of ongoing growth and development. :-)
I've seriously considered removing some of the older semi-popular projects from my github solely because I would be embarrassed to show them to a prospective employer, or even other developers. In the end I think it's actually kind of fun to look back through the code though, and think "surely I should have known about X back then... Why didn't I just do that instead."
Remember that your repos and commits are dated. If someone looks at code that old... what they see is a trend of improvement.
Re: Who wrote this shit?
#79Asking who wrote this shit is useless. However asking " what is this shit" is a perfectly valid thing to do. There are good developers producing crap due to constraints. There are also other developers producing crap because they can't produce anything else or just don't give a damn. Being able to differentiate between the two is often helpful, hence the "what" question.
When it's written by someone else, I start out assuming it's not shit at all, and I simply don't understand it yet. So I ask the person who wrote it (if available), and often they tell me it was a hack and please fix it.
Re: Who wrote this shit?
#80I did some freelancing (of the "setup an ecommerce site on a vps with some customisation and plugins for mom-and-pop shop" variety) in the 90s. No big jobs just lots of small ones to make some beer money.
The usual process was install osCommerce, add some extras, zip it all up and manually deploy it to a VPS and transfer the credentials to the owners.
The work was mostly found by word of mouth so it wasn't unusual to get emails asking for assistance/to do work out of the blue.
Had one such email to change an existing shop up a bit. Probably no more than a few days work. Received their credentials and ssh'd to the host machine to take a look. Scanning the source files of the plugins had me head scratching in a couple of places, decided this was compiled by someone terrible. Scrolled some more and saw the author's details. Oops. So that's how they got my email address.