Read The Comments
Posted on | May 22, 2009 | 1 Comment
There comes a time in a developer’s life where we have seen bad code. This happens relatively fast in your development. You pick up a new language, write some code, and comeback to it in a few months. You will be horrified at what you produced. Next time don’t beat yourself up about it. You are a better developer for recognizing your previous lack of skill. Because of this, you have improved.
Next you have a situation where a developer can become jagged when it comes to documentation. You pickup a nightmare… tons of code and horrible documentation. You read the comments and look at the code and think, “This doesn’t do that!” Even though it seems like a waste of time to read it, you are learning valuable lessons.
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Don’t be this guy. Working with this guy is horrible. It’s even worse working after this guy. You and your coworkers come up with new words for the amount of pain this guy created. You want to be famous not infamous as a programmer.
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After reading you know some of the deficiencies of the system. You gain valuable insights of some of the potential problems you will encounter. If you find that a developers’ comments are vague or inaccurate, you may want to check that area first when encountering problems.
I have a story to share. I was sitting in a code review recently. Someone asked me a question about a line of code, and I logically analyzed it right then and there. After I confirmed my code was correct, I gave a 30 sec blurb on why it was correct… and then I read the comment right above the line of code. I could have saved myself a minute by reading the comment first. I really blame the other person for not reading the comment first. Just kidding, but seriously if he read the comment it would have saved us both time.
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One Response to “Read The Comments”
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February 5th, 2010 @ 7:31 pm
Good Information.