What's going on here?
Ok you’se, I must humbly yet firmly say I’ve just about had it with the much of what I’ve found out there in the development community. Sure, once in a while it happens. We get lax in our good coding habits on occasion for various reasons. No harm done. Get a good weekend’s sleep & start up again Monday.
But I have to tell you, laziness, lack of a sense of doing things in excellence and taking things for granted seem to be par for the course quite a bit now. And since I run into it so often via various portals, I’d say a pattern has developed in our software development community that’s definitely not good. I find it everywhere: Blogs, Books, Forums, etc (see below).
About 2/3, and sometimes 4/5, of the time when I find something I *think* is going to help me, it ends up not working and I have to take time to debug the issue.
What am I speaking of? Here’s just a small taste of what I’ve run into lately (last couple months) while continuing to earn the money required to keep the electricity on:
Code Snips That Don’t Compile
I’m finding this ALL over the place! I even read a blog yesterday that claimed if you’re “really good”, you shouldn’t have to double-check yourself, test or even compile your stuff. Sorry, but I would imagine that person spends a lot of time conversing with QA. And ultimately the perception given is that the ego/arrogance points toward someone who probably doesn’t have a lot of friends either. I’ve found uncompilable code:
- In nearly every technical book I’ve purchased recently (last couple years)
- Hastily edited and released?
- On many blogs & forums I visit
- Hastily entered, maybe just to say they've got another post to add ?
- In places where people plagiarize other’s hard work
- Oh wow…if one is going to stoop to clipboard inheritance and lay their own label on it (which we all know is being done a lot out there), then one should at least compile and test the code one is copying and claiming is theirs first before pasting into their domain of choice
- It’s awesome if you either post a link to code or articles. It’s awesome if you want to copy/paste code and expand upon it, giving credit to those whom you got it from. It’s stealing and plagiarism if you copy/paste and claim it’s yours. Though we all know this, I thought I’d remind us to bring a little conviction to those out there who don’t respect this.
Software That Doesn’t Do/Perform As Advertised
Seems to be a severe lack of QA in some camps. They’re certainly not utilizing TDD & unit testing to its fullest, nor is QA doing a good job of thorough integration testing. I’ve found bad software:
- In nearly every free-of-charge profiling/optimization app out there
- Mostly concerning ASP.NET profiling
- One software pack actually had a forum where the techs admitted the app won’t work very well on ASP.NET apps if at all, yet it’s supposed profiling of ASP.NET is one of their main selling points!
- Unfortunately, in many blog engines I attempted to use (open source and otherwise) before landing on BlogEngine.net
- that claims to be turnkey and yet needs a week’s worth of configuration, tweaking, setup, etc.
Conclusion
I could rant on. But let’s just leave it at that. Here are a few humble suggestions:
- I know we get in a hurry sometimes, but if you’re editing and your job is editing, please be serious about your editing, especially when what you’re editing is going to be in a book
- Proof-read, read, re-read and then finally skim one last time before posting to your blog
- Don’t plagiarize…please. Give credit where credit is due. People will ultimately respect you more for it
- If you’re a coder, QA your own code as much as you can. Utilize good TDD techniques & tools and NEVER release uncompiled, untested code!
- If you’re QA, then QA fully via your own testing methodologies, preferably with applicable testing software
- Make sure your code/software does what you say it will do before releasing
- Make sure your docs are up to date, accurate and, by the way, that they’re written to begin with!
And, ultimately:
- Compile your code & test before pasting it into your book
- Compile your code & test before pasting it into your forum
- Compile your code & test before pasting it into your blog
- Compile your code & test before answering someone’s question on StackOverflow and other awesome forums
- Compile your code & test before going to lunch
- Compile your code & test before going to the potty
- Did I mention to compile & test your code?
- Did I make mention on mentioning to compile & test your code?
- Did I stutter and cause you to doubt the point I’m attempting to get across? {-o)
I look very much forward to things getting better.
P.S:
Here's a video that says it all. *** WARNING *** - LOT'S of potty-mouth in it. I struggled with posting it and went back and forth a few times because of the language. But it's all in English caption at the bottom of the video, not spoken outloud in English. So I'd say it's SFW (at least in the US). The video itself is in German, so I've no clue what they're saying (please forgive me my German bro's if there's anything off-color!). Anyone who knows me knows I don't frequent the potty mouth. But it was sent to me by a colleague and the message in the video says it all. Plus, I happen to have worked with managers like the "Hitler" in this vid, so I can certainly relate.