Worse Than Death

Anecdotes are fun things arent they?

Now, you might think the title of this post somewhat grim, but its actually an... ahem... 'adaptation' of one my favourite sites which specialises in these anecdotes, mainly in regards to I.T.

My particular title refers to a developer's code. When the code breaks, it dies. However, there are things worse than death (or failure, as the true site from which I ripped off my title states)...

The Daily WTF (Worse Than Failure... of course! What were you thinking?) is a site dedicated to various developers and consultants sharing their 'wtf' moments with the rest of the world, giving us tired old (or young) developers something to chuckle at during the blessed quiet periods of our week/month (rare enough, but it does happen).

I have been recently working with a section of the application my collegues and I support, that is, shall we say, less than consistent with the rest of the application, and very much a true 'wtf' section (thats right, section). Never in my life have I seen such 'coding skills' put together in a mish-mash of methods and procs, double/triple/quadruple(!) nested inner joins and various hideous perversions (borrowing from the Daily WTF's terminolgy) in one collected place (apart from Daily WTF of course). It got me thinking though...

Noone is perfect.

Thats right, everyone at some stage in their career will do something so stupid, so 'beyond logic' that the developer that comes in after you will sprout stomach ulcers like weeds after opening that first class you've created. I think the only thing we can do is pray its not too bad and that you have commented the crap out of your work to give the poor dev a starting point. I know Ive done one or two things that Ive come back later on and simply scratched my head, deleted it all and re-done the section.

Its very hard dealing with someone else's crappy code, but like I said everyone at some point in their lives will write something horrible... If you are lucky, you can go back and re-write it properly (or god forbid, make it worse) before anyone notices, otherwise...

Well, I guess we'll see it around the Daily WTF :P