who wrote this shit?
This post is a response to Philip Heltweg’s “who wrote this shit” post.
I like the post linked above, it describes a junior developer who internalises the behaviour of ;
- see some bad code
git blameto find out who wrote it- expect to see a name that you don’t recognise
- mutter with discontent
The author of the original post goes on to describe the case when he was pairing with a developer he respected, and found the bad code’s author was this very same developer.
The author has an immediate spoonful of medicine empathy and humility as he realises we can all write bad code, and wonders what environment that code was writing within.
I want to go one step further and say, I enjoy it when it’s my own name listed in the git blame against the offending lines of code.
We were all junior engineers at some point. When I see some code that I know to be bad, and when I see that it was me who wrote it I don’t feel the sense of dread of being “bad”. Instead, it’s wonderful.
- Imagine if I didn’t know that was bad code?
- Imagine if I had always been writing code like that?
The fact that I can see now that something is bad means that I am a better engineer than I was before. I have learnt something. I am grateful to see my name against bad code, because at least I now know it’s bad.