Comments on: Making Mistakes So You Don’t Have To: Development Tools

By: derek martin

derek martin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:12:19 +0000

“It’s amazing what happens when you stop to think about all the techniques you’ve learned and then figure out the best way to weld them all together to solve a problem.”

That perfectly describes the problem I’m having at the moment. I’ve inherited a codebase from a developer who *obviously* knows LOTS of stuff inside and out. He setup the server. He wrote the framework. He wrote the logic. He wrote the ORM (php + mysql5.1 + stored procedures). He wrote the javascript. What he forgot to do is “STOP AND THINK”. As a result, the code is hard to read, and offers 7 different ways to do anything… but only 1 way is un-deprecated, and which of the 7 that is remain un-documented He was too busy to stop, think, refactor. Pushed by tight deadlines and being a 1-man-army, his battle-cry was “I’ll fix that later”. That’s fine when it’s always going to be a 1-man-shop, but now they’re trying to scale to more developers, and after staring at the code for SIX WEEKS, I can still barely make heads or tails of it… and I’ve been a full-time professional php developer for 8 years now. It’s ridiculous!

p.s. — did you choose the words that show up in your captcha? Mine currently says “overconfidence”

By: Dieter_be

Dieter_be — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:58:55 +0000

“And if you AREN’T using a version control system (no, renaming files to index.php.old.frank is NOT version control) then you should stop calling yourself a programmer. Seriously.”

They can call themselves programmers, as long as they don’t call themselves *developers*

By: Neon

Neon — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 09:13:10 +0000

“Don’t procrastinate, read the documentation”
This is so so true! I get questions at work from people working on Cake applications who know PHP, but are just trying to copy entire chunks of controller code into new controllers and wondering why it doesn’t work.

Nothing worse than seeing all that raw php in an application, which is doing the same thing that helpers and framework functions are there for.