Be nice to programmers

If we work in such a way that produces high entropy codebases, hides problems instead of illuminating them, or produce (or have to work with) highly inter-braided (complicated) architecture with no way or occasion in which to improve matters, then it's easier for people to be caught by grudge at their employer, clients, or circumstance. People can be influenced by these bad circumstances to abandon themselves, and in doing so, their resultant ignorant behavior will make their mind mind become dark. This is a most dangerous circumstance for a human being to live in, so the task of the modern programmer is to find out what they have worth living for, to find a good self, and to protect themselves from wrong relationships and from destroying themselves (through loss of simplicity in one's life) such that they can effect their benefit for themselves and the world. Without individual awakening then it doesn't matter what profession they hold, they still can't guide their life properly. So the most important teaching for programmers to save their way of life is that they have to understand properly what life is, how great a teaching it is for us, and just how precious is the opportunity that we have been given through our lives as human beings.

(Step 0 is possibly 'get a bug report')

1. Write a test

2. Watch the test fail

3. Write code

4. Watch the test pass (if fail, goto 3)

5. Make the code pretty

6. Watch the test pass

7. Repeat

Instead of negatives, you're looking for positives. At the end you're rewarded with nicer code than you started with and green lights all the way down.

It's all about how you frame it - why would you frame the activity you spend most of your life doing negatively?

This is also highly apparent in social apps (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, etc). We encourage negative feedback when we give people a platform to do so. For better or worse, a lot of what we create is simply enabling the insatiable devil inside of people.

It sucks, but most people are unhappy and they will always look for another avenue to vent their frustrations. We just turned it into an easy-to-use textbox that's available 24/7.

You cannot expect people to be positive when the thing you gave them (seemingly, from their perspective) encourages negativity.

All that aside, you can't let people get to you. The world is getting increasingly judgmental and you just have to roll with the punches.

But my belief is the same, the solution to the problems described in the article is time/experience, not the adoption of some pessimistic mindset. You will run into bugs when working in other peoples code, as a result you will learn not to make those mistakes. Over time you will get quicker at identifying similar bugs and will be able to resolve them quicker each time as well.

The most common answer to any CS question that you are asked in college is "It depends". So how do you resolve these nasty legacy code bugs? Well, it depends. Is this code reused a lot in other places? Is this critical functionality to the user? Once you determine how important the buggy code is, you can decide whether to solve it with a hack or a well thought out solution.

Don't sweat the bugs, don't become a Debby Downer, fix them as they rise, and keep building cool shit.

I'm not a professional coder, but I do a significant amount of hacking and coding for one of my research fields (Computational Economics). I noticed this cycle too--this cycle of focusing on the negatives. It really did bring me down.

I chatted with my adviser, who was married for a number of years to a child psychologist. She recommended to him that every time he accomplishes something small, get up and walk around. Do something small to reward yourself. Then, get back to coding. This inserts a positive stimuli in an otherwise negative feedback loop. The more bugs you solve, the happier you are.

I've found this to be very helpful for me. Hope if helps some of y'all too.