Re: Hoss'ss Last Words

Nicely done.

The best bits of programming wisdom that I ever caught were these:

Above all else, capture the designer’s intent,” even if ... especially if ... that designer is you and there is no one else working with you. Any fool can see what the code is. No one can see why. No one has a cucking flue why.
Six weeks from now, even your own work will have become the work of a stranger. See #1.

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Re^2: Hoss'ss Last Words by cavac (Parson) on Jan 24, 2012 at 00:51 UTC
Six weeks from now, even your own work will have become the work of a stranger. Words of wisdom, indeed. Just today i had to bugfix a project a colleage of mine based on some old, alpha-version of my web framework. My reactions where something like this: Why has this file a timestamp of early 2010? Has it really been this long? Oh god, i'm getting old... Why wont this jQuery command work? Whoops, that was before i started using jQuery... How the f..k do i install this? Where is the Makefile.PL? Oh, yes, that was before i made it into a module... Uhm, i managed to accidently kill the running instance. Now how do i start it again??? On the plus side, i realized that all the hard work in the 2 years since then really paid off. I even managed to document ~~all~~ uhm ~~most of~~ ok, well ~~part of~~ some of my codebase. And the double-plus side, nowadays hardly any configuration file requires misspelling keywords for the program to actually work... "You have reached the Monastery. All our helpdesk monks are busy at the moment. Please press "1" to instantly donate 10 currency units for a good cause or press "2" to hang up. Or you can dial "12" to get connected directly to second level support."	[reply]

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Re^2: Hoss'ss Last Words
by cavac (Parson) on Jan 24, 2012 at 00:51 UTC

Six weeks from now, even your own work will have become the work of a stranger.

Words of wisdom, indeed. Just today i had to bugfix a project a colleage of mine based on some old, alpha-version of my web framework.

My reactions where something like this:

Why has this file a timestamp of early 2010? Has it really been this long? Oh god, i'm getting old...
Why wont this jQuery command work? Whoops, that was before i started using jQuery...
How the f..k do i install this? Where is the Makefile.PL? Oh, yes, that was before i made it into a module...
Uhm, i managed to accidently kill the running instance. Now how do i start it again???

On the plus side, i realized that all the hard work in the 2 years since then really paid off. I even managed to document ~~all~~ uhm ~~most of~~ ok, well ~~part of~~ some of my codebase. And the double-plus side, nowadays hardly any configuration file requires misspelling keywords for the program to actually work...

"You have reached the Monastery. All our helpdesk monks are busy at the moment. Please press "1" to instantly donate 10 currency units for a good cause or press "2" to hang up. Or you can dial "12" to get connected directly to second level support."

[reply]

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