Everyone produce code. Some peoples give birth to some beautiful, elegant and maintainable code sometime in their career. But pretty much all developers will one day or another give code that is so horrible, inelegant and un-maintainable.
I’m trying as much as possible to separate concerns inside my application so that I don’t have to care about problematic maintenance. I’ve recently had to review some code I did more than a month ago and… I’m not proud. I’m really not proud of the code I saw. It seems that every once in a while we write some code that we won’t be proud of.
Of course, we improve our coding skills every day and every time we encounter new technology and new idea. Hell, I like the SOLID principles and the TDD ideas. I love the concept of separation of concerns and modularization of an application. So how come I wrote this code?
I can’t remember exactly why honestly. Maybe I was rushed or I wanted to rush through it. How knows… what is important however is to know that the code that you wrote taste like a cheap wine. It’s important to take a note of it and make sure to “maintain your code garden”. This is at the moment that the title of my blog actually makes sense. Even with the best intention, code quality decay and if nothing is done, you finish with a half rotten application that nobody will care about.
So what to do about it? Make sure to improve the quality of existing code everyday. If we write bad code 10% of the time (number that I just picked from the top of my head) and good code 90% of the time, imagine if we take only a few hours per week to correct mistakes.
You probably won’t have the time to fix it. Who does? But there will be a day where you will finish an hour early and that you will wonder if you should start implementing a new feature or go home early. If you took note of those classes that need improvements, you could easily take this hour to maintain your code garden and be proud of the code that you did.
So, the first “time off” that I have will be used to fix this part of code that I’m not proud of.
Anyone else who wrote some shameful code?
Given how many methodologies, discussion, blogs, tools are devoted purely to creating an environment to generate "better" code, it probably goes without saying that a huge number of us are not code poets 100% (or event 5%) of the time.
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