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It's been a hugely busy day. Didn't get to bed this morning until about 02:00. I still managed to crawl my ass out of bed and be at work by 07:30. Worked with Oakland today, he's a great guy, but as David, my manager, said once, he doesn't have the teaching gene. Right now I've got 2 hat's I'm trying to wear. I'm the build man, and I'm doing Y2K work on our legacy program. It's all in visual basic, but my god, it has evolution written all over it. At no point in the past has anyone ever gotten the approval to unfuck this code.Now I realize that, this is an unfair attitude. But here's the deal. If you are programming, and you have been responsible for a hunk of code for more than 6 months, if it's good, you're just maintaining it, if it sucks, you wrote it. So if you are maintaining code you had better maintain it. If you are the sole person responsible for it, make sure that the code quality is something that you can be proud of. If you managers will not let you modify the code (an understandable position, and generally wise decision) then by god, comment the hell out of it. Einstein once said that if you can not explain what you do to a six year old, you don't really understand what you do. If a six year old can read your code, and understand what's going on, then and only then can you say that you have enough comments. If you are going to bring up the concept that badly commented code is worse than code with no comments, well, I can't argue with you, but I think it's harder to write bad comments than it is to write bad code.
ooops, how did that happen?
[SET TIRADE=OFF]What I was going to say was that I'm working on this horrible, horrible code and having to ask Oakland for help. Oak, as I was saying, is a great guy, not that great a teacher. He has a tendency to say what ever comes to mind and expect people to understand that because he didn't mean to insult them that they should not be insulted. What was cool though was that at one point I was about to blow, and I stopped and as calmly as I could said, "You have no intentions of being condescending, do you?"
"No, none"
And all of the sudden, it was ok, I was hearing "you are a stupid person and do not deserve to be called programmer". And all he had said was, "You have to use a little bit of thinking to do this, you have to really think your way through it". He said some other things to and what it came down to was, "this code is a bitch, I have done a lot of exploring in it, but don't think that the guide I gave you is a tutorial, because it's not. Besides, what you are showing me is pretty good work, I'm glad it's coming along this well."
So, long story short, I ended up getting a complement from someone who I thought was jamming on my work.