I’m making a run up to Illinois this afternoon to pick up a half-cow’s worth of grass-fed beef. This was one of the cows The Older Brother raised on a local farm. Brief visit with the family, then back to Tennessee on Saturday with a van-load of meat.
During all that time on the road, I won’t be able to check comments. I’ll get to them when I can.
On a completely unrelated note, my project manager at work sent a bunch of us a link to this essay about programming — probably because he’s had so many of us (definitely including me) look at existing systems we’re supposed to fix or update and growl, “What @#$%ing idiot wrote this piece of $#@%!!”
Any of you coders out there will appreciate it. Long essay, but very funny.
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About 90% of the time when I say “Who wrote this piece of $H!7”, I immediately bring up the git blame dialog and say “Oh, right, I did.”
As someone who’s been dealing all day with this bit of code, written by some Irish guys
{assign var=”items_per_row” value=2}
{if $items}
{foreach from=$items item=”it” name=”fitems”}
{if $smarty.foreach.fitems.iteration % $items_per_row == 0}
{/if}
designed to modify an ecommerce shopping cart written by Russians, I find this article funny simply because, well, yeah.
We take possession of our next side of grass-fed beef in June, which is good because the moo-cow portion of our freezer is running a little low.
Let me preface this with a sincere apology to all fatheads who read this blog who are not coders. You should probably scroll past my post. It is full-metal geek.
I read this link out of my FB feed last week and it is both hysterical and spot on. Way back then I had posted a comment that while I’ve certainly experienced a LOT of bad coding and been pressured due to unrealistic deadlines to write my own icky code (though I do try to comment to living daylights out of it) I am currently on a dream project with a dream team. While not being sloppy with time the PM allows us enough time to design a proper solution and even do clean up. Everything is reviewed and after coding I have a business tester who takes no prisoners. I’ve written the best code of my career.
And I even have one of those programs I’m so proud of it brings a tear to my eye. I spent half a year understanding and then cleaning up a complex HIPAA 834 transaction program (yes, government spec software) until it purred and can actually be maintained. Sigh. It is a beautiful thing. And no one else touches it because no one else understands it, or thinks they can’t. I’m sure that now others can actually read this code.
So fast forward to this week. I’ve been tapped to move to a new position going back to technical lead work in the same kind of system but for a different state. But this time I’m management who reviews code. I was sort of given a choice but not really. Funny how the first thing I think of is having to face the code base before I rewrote it. I’m tempted to put up a fuss to take my own code with me.
My favorite system to work on is the one I developed for trademark and patent attorneys — because I wrote every bit of it and therefore understand all the logic. And yet I still left plenty of comments just to remind myself what I was thinking. And that’s come in handy.
About 90% of the time when I say “Who wrote this piece of $H!7”, I immediately bring up the git blame dialog and say “Oh, right, I did.”
As someone who’s been dealing all day with this bit of code, written by some Irish guys
{assign var=”items_per_row” value=2}
{if $items}
{foreach from=$items item=”it” name=”fitems”}
{if $smarty.foreach.fitems.iteration % $items_per_row == 0}
{/if}
designed to modify an ecommerce shopping cart written by Russians, I find this article funny simply because, well, yeah.
We take possession of our next side of grass-fed beef in June, which is good because the moo-cow portion of our freezer is running a little low.
Let me preface this with a sincere apology to all fatheads who read this blog who are not coders. You should probably scroll past my post. It is full-metal geek.
I read this link out of my FB feed last week and it is both hysterical and spot on. Way back then I had posted a comment that while I’ve certainly experienced a LOT of bad coding and been pressured due to unrealistic deadlines to write my own icky code (though I do try to comment to living daylights out of it) I am currently on a dream project with a dream team. While not being sloppy with time the PM allows us enough time to design a proper solution and even do clean up. Everything is reviewed and after coding I have a business tester who takes no prisoners. I’ve written the best code of my career.
And I even have one of those programs I’m so proud of it brings a tear to my eye. I spent half a year understanding and then cleaning up a complex HIPAA 834 transaction program (yes, government spec software) until it purred and can actually be maintained. Sigh. It is a beautiful thing. And no one else touches it because no one else understands it, or thinks they can’t. I’m sure that now others can actually read this code.
So fast forward to this week. I’ve been tapped to move to a new position going back to technical lead work in the same kind of system but for a different state. But this time I’m management who reviews code. I was sort of given a choice but not really. Funny how the first thing I think of is having to face the code base before I rewrote it. I’m tempted to put up a fuss to take my own code with me.
My favorite system to work on is the one I developed for trademark and patent attorneys — because I wrote every bit of it and therefore understand all the logic. And yet I still left plenty of comments just to remind myself what I was thinking. And that’s come in handy.
grass fed beef: om nom nom!
essay on programming: yeah i’m not going to read that!
grass fed beef: om nom nom!
essay on programming: yeah i’m not going to read that!
I don’t know much about coding, but the “All programming teams are constructed by and of crazy people” portion of the article brought back memories of “team” “meetings” that were the mainstay and love of the corporation I worked for. People would be assigned or volunteer for the team that had no idea what it was about. Sometimes that person was me, assigned not volunteered. The best part was the bosses that were more or less in charge of the people that were on the teams wanted updates on the meetings, or if they did want to come to the meetings would want to schedule them for a time that was inconvenient for half of the team, then they would show up 15 minutes late and want us to start over. Or the ever popular LUNCH MEETING. Just what I wanted. A cruddy 45 minute meeting with even cruddier Dominos pizza.
Meetings are at best a necessarily evil — kind of like government.
I don’t know much about coding, but the “All programming teams are constructed by and of crazy people” portion of the article brought back memories of “team” “meetings” that were the mainstay and love of the corporation I worked for. People would be assigned or volunteer for the team that had no idea what it was about. Sometimes that person was me, assigned not volunteered. The best part was the bosses that were more or less in charge of the people that were on the teams wanted updates on the meetings, or if they did want to come to the meetings would want to schedule them for a time that was inconvenient for half of the team, then they would show up 15 minutes late and want us to start over. Or the ever popular LUNCH MEETING. Just what I wanted. A cruddy 45 minute meeting with even cruddier Dominos pizza.
Meetings are at best a necessarily evil — kind of like government.
There was a guy at Disney who would name functions after himself. If you couldn’t figure out what the hell he’d written, which happened often, he’d at least left a real-world pointer to his desk. Or my other favorite, the “while 1” loop with a separate break clause.
Good grief. I worked at Disney as a contractor, but I guess I was lucky enough to miss his code.
That essay was hilarious – and I couldn’t write a line of code if my life depended on it.
Hanging on my wife’s office wall is a captioned picture of a large group of professionals gathered in a circle to “put a hand in” as if to do a cheer:
“Meetings: None of us is as dumb as all of us.”
Too often too true.
I have a poster from the same place and it is a picture of a bunch of dead light bulbs with only one lit and the caption is “Cluelessness. There Are No Stupid Questions, But There Are A Lot of Inquisitive Idiots.”
The website is despair.com and everything they have is hysterical.
Loved the essay, Tom. It would be funny if it were not also true. I’ve rewritten my share of bad programs in my day.
As one of my (good programmer) pals at work replied when I was gnashing my teeth over some awful code, “Hey, the bad programmers keep us employed.”
There was a guy at Disney who would name functions after himself. If you couldn’t figure out what the hell he’d written, which happened often, he’d at least left a real-world pointer to his desk. Or my other favorite, the “while 1” loop with a separate break clause.
Good grief. I worked at Disney as a contractor, but I guess I was lucky enough to miss his code.
That essay was hilarious – and I couldn’t write a line of code if my life depended on it.
Hanging on my wife’s office wall is a captioned picture of a large group of professionals gathered in a circle to “put a hand in” as if to do a cheer:
“Meetings: None of us is as dumb as all of us.”
Too often too true.
I have a poster from the same place and it is a picture of a bunch of dead light bulbs with only one lit and the caption is “Cluelessness. There Are No Stupid Questions, But There Are A Lot of Inquisitive Idiots.”
The website is despair.com and everything they have is hysterical.
Loved the essay, Tom. It would be funny if it were not also true. I’ve rewritten my share of bad programs in my day.
As one of my (good programmer) pals at work replied when I was gnashing my teeth over some awful code, “Hey, the bad programmers keep us employed.”
I’m afraid to click the link because it might reveal that I’m the idiot in question…
My guess is that programmers everywhere were reading that and thinking it applied to the programmer in the next cubicle.
Well, it is the programmer in the next cubicle. And it is also the programmer in our own cubicle. I’ve looked at code I wrote in the past and said to myself “Did I really write that? What the heck was I smoking?”
I’m afraid to click the link because it might reveal that I’m the idiot in question…
My guess is that programmers everywhere were reading that and thinking it applied to the programmer in the next cubicle.
Well, it is the programmer in the next cubicle. And it is also the programmer in our own cubicle. I’ve looked at code I wrote in the past and said to myself “Did I really write that? What the heck was I smoking?”
MMMMMMM, meat wagon….
MMMMMMM, meat wagon….
Being a coder myself, I find it interesting to compare how differently good software and our bodies handle invalid input.
When writing a program to be used by others (or myself the next day) I want to make sure that the input is checked to avoid any crashes later on. Also when processing the seemingly correct input, I also make sure that any piece of data the program reads is valid.
Our bodies don’t work like this. You feed it garbage and it does not stop you from doing so. In the end you get the garbage on the output though 😉
Being a coder myself, I find it interesting to compare how differently good software and our bodies handle invalid input.
When writing a program to be used by others (or myself the next day) I want to make sure that the input is checked to avoid any crashes later on. Also when processing the seemingly correct input, I also make sure that any piece of data the program reads is valid.
Our bodies don’t work like this. You feed it garbage and it does not stop you from doing so. In the end you get the garbage on the output though 😉
During our Smalltalk days, we had a contractor from Denmark who would wander the hallways saying “It’s crap, all crap!”
One of my favorites lines of head-scratching code from that time, written by someone who should’ve known better (no, not me) was:
self ifNil: …
I’m retiring at the end of the month and must learn not to despair over the fate of all the beautiful code I’ve spent years honing and tweaking.
It’s a bit like watching your children leave the home and go into the world. You hope they don’t get corrupted.
During our Smalltalk days, we had a contractor from Denmark who would wander the hallways saying “It’s crap, all crap!”
One of my favorites lines of head-scratching code from that time, written by someone who should’ve known better (no, not me) was:
self ifNil: …
I’m retiring at the end of the month and must learn not to despair over the fate of all the beautiful code I’ve spent years honing and tweaking.
It’s a bit like watching your children leave the home and go into the world. You hope they don’t get corrupted.
SmallTalk .. Byte Magazine .. the smell of sheep lanolin in the floors of DEC’s plant in Maynard, Mass.
Dear dead days.
Sláinte
SmallTalk .. Byte Magazine .. the smell of sheep lanolin in the floors of DEC’s plant in Maynard, Mass.
Dear dead days.
Sláinte
That coding piece was terrific! Too true….but hilarious. Thank you!
That coding piece was terrific! Too true….but hilarious. Thank you!