Coding
My own very recent personal experience mirrors this blog post: Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age So what do I do to deal with that? Looking at Vivek’s advice, item number 1 is to move into management … yikes… I firmly believe that if someone thought I had the chops to be a manager it would have happened 20 years ago… nobody wants to make me a boss, trust me :) besides which, I like coding! Item 2 sucks… and goes totally against the American Dream of continually moving up… expect to...
OK... particularly fugly code... wow. I'm about 2/3 of the way refactoring this huge beast of an application. I'm pulling SQL out of the code behind and putting it into the database layer. I'm using StringBuilder to avoid the loooooong chained together strings they used. Anything possible, I'm pushing to Oracle. But some of the worst is the client-side code. Multiple times I've found 60 or 80 non-breakable spaces to move something to the right! Data entry forms with 6 rows of data to fill out, and...
I'm a big fan of being a self-starter, always learning, and trying new stuff. A big percentage of what I've learned in the software biz has been ratting around in other people's code... I had one Fortran IV class back in '67 and I sucked at it. I had some 1-on-1 help from a great guy teaching me BASIC in '68, and since then it's been Assembly (how many people bought their own copy of MASM?? -- twice??), Pascal, C, C++, C#, various databases, and forgetabout all the OS versions from mainframes to...
I can go a long time without time off, or at least time away from the office, but I hit tilt today. It started early with not being able to find the code for the book to upload. Then when I did, I realized I hadn’t tracked chapter changes in the code so although the code was good, naming was wrong… fail! Then at the office trying to finish the latest refactoring effort I got to the point of adding Help files and wanted to add a Help button in a new column in a couple places. Things just looked hinky...