Would you support this code?

“If I had to perform all future maintenance on this code, would I be happy?”
or
“Would Person X still be my friend if I left them to maintain this code?”

I’ve been thinking recently about motivating developers to write good (ie. maintainable) code.

We all know how easy it is to fire and forget… moving from project to project, leaving maintenance to the next guy. Why would I want to worry about nitty gritty things like unit tests or encapsulation when I can crank out dialogs and widgets day in and day out. Well… what if new development stopped and all that was left was maintenance or enhancement of the existing code base? It’d probably be a difficult transition.

In my opinion, it takes a seasoned (or perhaps dedicated is a better word) developer to realize the importance of quality and the implications of not considering maintainability in your designs. It’s one thing to recognize the importance of quality and another thing to actually make correct decisions to achieve it.

Some people have a knack for it, but not everyone. The difficult thing (yet critically important) is encouraging the development of these skills and ensuring that maintainability and quality don’t fall by the wayside.

That’s enough from me. Back to your regularly scheduled program.

It’s Ridiculously Cold

I was in Mexico a couple weeks ago and I come back to this…

The first snow storm of the year happened yesterday and it was pretty rough by Victoria standards. The city was essentially shutdown today, no buses, no university, and no work for me.

I may live in Canada, but I don’t live in Alberta, Ontario or Quebec. The mild west coast is supposed to be exactly that.. mild. Luckily snow doesn’t tend to stay long around here and hopefully it’ll clear up by tomorrow.

First Hack Day

The past little while I’ve been planning a Hack Day for the company that I work for.

We were originally supposed to hold it a few months back but some project deadlines got in the way and it inevitably got delayed.

However, we’re in the home stretch and we’ll actually be holding the event tomorrow, November 24th at our Victoria office. It’s an internal only event (unlike Yahoo’s latest endeavor) but it should be a lot of fun. We’ve managed to get a bit of a budget for it so we’ll be handing out a few prizes.

Essentially, the goal of this event is to give our developers (and QA/CS/Profession Services, etc.) an opportunity to explore technologies and/or frameworks that they wouldn’t normally get to deal with in the course of normal work. Everyone has an idea of something cool to do but it’s a rarity to have the time to actually do something… we’re hoping to present that opportunity.

It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out, I’m hoping that this is the first of many hack fests.

Time to get back to my Rails hack.