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Not just humility: the author goes on to explain all his practices to defend himself from himself. These attracted my attention, for no programmer I know enjoys
by albertcardona 18y ago
Not just humility: the author goes on to explain all his practices to defend himself from himself. These attracted my attention, for no programmer I know enjoys them:
3) Be a testing masochist, i.e., I ruthlessly try to break my own code.
4) Have other programmers inspect my code.
The author goes on to explain how he approached fixing a broken program: to stop catching errors and letting it crash. Which meant getting stack traces and fixing them on the spot. Combined with his aggressive use of assertions, no wonder he fixed it.
- andreyf 18y agoThese attracted my attention, for no programmer I know enjoys them... Really? Maybe I have competitive split personalties, but testing my code is a lot of times more fun than writing it. And at least for junior developers, getting feedback from those with more experience is probably the most valuable part of a job. It kind of blows my mind to hear that some programmers commit code they haven't thoroughly tested, or avoid showing their code to other people...
- ewiethoff 18y ago> 3) Be a testing masochist, i.e., I ruthlessly try to break my own code. 'Hap' means luck. Therefore, the happy path is the lucky path. Being a natural pessimist, I can't help picturing unlucky paths and believing they will be followed. So I enjoy trying to break my code. Not trying to sound arrogant here, I also think of end users and client coders as "idiots." I find joy in trying to make stuff "idiot-proof." A humbler term would be "bullet-proof," but I picked up "idiot-proof" almost thirty years ago, and I'm stuck with it.