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Yeah absolutely. I always reduced this to "three months" and passed the phrase around to juniors, etc. And when I interviewed at the last company I worked for,
by fapjacks 10y ago
Yeah absolutely. I always reduced this to "three months" and passed the phrase around to juniors, etc. And when I interviewed at the last company I worked for, the CEO specifically said, "If you aren't horrified by something you wrote three months ago..." And that's when I knew I wanted to work there (among many other reasons, of course).
- hinkley 10y agoI would worry that this would encourage more tech debt than I'm comfortable with. I already struggle with people shrugging off obviously predictable consequences of their thoughtlessness. I kind of expect people to at least attempt to think three months out. Who knows what we'll be doing in six but cmon.
- fapjacks 10y agoDo you really look at code you wrote three months ago -- or any code you've just written -- and not see a lot of things you could improve? This isn't about not having foresight or failing to plan or not designing well.
- hinkley 10y agoEvery time I am about to do a commit, I look at the code and give myself fifteen minutes to make it better. Always have (probably a habit I learned doing homework in college? I'm not quite sure). In the grand scheme of things you'd hardly notice that it takes me a little bit longer. Over time those improvements become habituated and I just do a lot of them while I'm coding. Especially when I get stuck. It's not in like cleaning while you cook. Once you have a tempo it hardly takes any longer to prepare the food but you don't leave yourself with a mess that discourages you from doing it again.
- fapjacks 10y agoYou seem to be implying that you only ever need fifteen minutes after any programming task to make all possible improvements that could ever happen to that code.