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This would sound like questionable advice except that the best code I wrote in college resulted from an accident… I’d sat down all night and written some C for
by allenrb 3y ago
This would sound like questionable advice except that the best code I wrote in college resulted from an accident…
I’d sat down all night and written some C for a graphics class. Everything was great, yay, victory. Proceeded to tar it up per class guidelines and did something like this:
tar cvf assignment.c assignment.h data.txt readme whatever.cuz
And as many of you no doubt recognize, I’d forgotten to supply a destination name before listing the source files.
So the code was gone. My brain was gone, too, so I explained what happened and sent what I had, including a working executable, to the TA. He gave me an extra day to finish.
So the next day I sat down and wrote it all again and as mentioned above, it was some of the best code I’d written. Doing it again from the top saved all sorts of dead ends and mistaken approaches.
- majikandy 3y agoThis is exactly the type of story I tell when people are anti pair programming. I ask them if they’ve ever lost a days code (usually asking if they ever used source safe) and that when they finally knuckled down to write it again, it took about 20 minutes. As the writing the code wasn’t really the hard part or the bottleneck, solving the problem was the hard part. Hence pair programming having two heads on one problem to solve it better/faster, find the edge cases etc. Out of curiosity, was it really fast for you to do it in that extra day or did it take all day?
- allenrb 3y agoMuch faster the second time. Like you said, all of the problems came pre-solved. :-)