Today’s code smell is temporary fields. Like with all code smells, sometimes these aren’t a problem at all. For example, it’s pretty normal to have a user object with a bunch of optional fields. Sometimes you have users who just start out with a username and a password and fill in their profiles later and sometimes you have fields for stuff like social media accounts that only some users will.. Read More
Arrogance is definitely a blocker
The latest The Workplace question to inspire me to write a whole post is How do you counter the argument that “Arrogance isn’t a blocker”? I don’t understand why a professional would ever say that arrogance isn’t a blocker, but I’ve sure got opinions on how to counter that argument! First of all, software development is a team sport. Sure, side projects and prototypes can be built by individuals, but the vast,.. Read More
It doesn’t work unless it all works together
Or, let’s talk about context some more! So last week I talked about how you can’t know if code is good or bad without knowing the context, what you’re actually trying to accomplish with that code, what was most important when it was written (priorities change, that doesn’t mean that the way the code was written at the time wasn’t perfectly reasonable for the context it was written in). But.. Read More
Context!
So I was browsing workplace.stackexchange.com questions late one night, as you do, and came across an interesting one: How to explain business priorities to a programmer. That one didn’t go at all the way I thought from the title. It turns out the business priorities actually did make sense (the business had this wild idea that queries, even especially complicated ones, should take less than 4 hours to run) and the programmer.. Read More
Be a better programmer while still having a life: part 12
Keep it simple! It sounds obvious, but I have wasted so much time debugging problems that turned out to be something ridiculously simple like my browser cache being outdated, having forgotten to deploy my code, having made my updates in my local database instead of the staging database, etc, etc. Better developers are more productive, and you know what instantly makes a person more productive? Wasting less time! Double checking extremely.. Read More