Joel Spolsky (and his ubuquitous book/blog “Joel on Software”)
This is the first time I’m read this person’s name. From the blog author’s description, it seems like he has lots to say, but not a lot of it is worthwhile.
Gasp Don’t remind me how old I’m getting. Joel’s blog was really big deal, upto ~15 years ago when he stopped blogging. He and Jeff Atwood created Stack Overflow.
Question marked as duplicate: answered in this thread from 15 years ago with no relevant information on anything you were actually asking and has now been deleted — https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1/where-oh-where-did-the-joel-data-go
My age isn’t likely to be the reason why I’ve never heard of him (or maybe forgot about him). Looking into him, he seems like exactly the type of person I wouldn’t pay much attention to.
Someone who shares their experiences gained from writing real world software, with introspection into the dynamics & struggles involved?
Your age (or mostly career progression, which is correlated) may actually be a reason you have no interest in this.
This person went through their entire career and never have met a bad programmer?
It’s not just about the code. It’s about delivery. I’ve worked with devs who are incompetent. I’ve worked with devs who write wild code for simple tasks.
And the whole “it’s just a opinion.” Like no?
Sounds like a whole lot of programmers have a case of “never mentally graduated from high school” if there’s a habit of “witch-hunting” the “baddies”. Which… Unsurprising, after a regretted stint in military IT, everything involving rank or seniority looks like high school dynamics to me anymore, and Hacker News is FULL of personalities that project multiple hours of their lives spent stuffed inside a locker onto other people-- I can’t help but question if it wouldn’t be easier for these would-be witch-hunters to just offer a hand to these “bad” programmers, rather than tearing them down.
Iunno. Maybe I’m expecting too much maturity from modern techbros; and maybe I shouldn’t be bothering with the field.
It has, in my experience, always been this shitty.
From the days of RTFM onward, and it was probably around before then.
Humans enjoy nothing more than feeling we are better in some way.
Always worth reminding ourselves how silly we all are.
But watch, they’ll turn around and wonder why I won’t interface with the squadron company function, why I don’t care about going out for drinks with my coworkers, and why I never buy into the whole 'we’re a family so you should give more of yourself to the corp than you do your ACTUAL family’ nonsense after all of that. It’s a contemptuous ‘better-than-thou’ complex, everywhere, and it’s tiresome.
“Am I blithely leaving a path of coding carnage that others are forced to clean up?”
I’ve never seen any evidence that the programmers I hate cleaning up after have ever, even once asked themselves this question.
Edit: Op is probably fine, and I appreciate everyone who takes the time to introspect on the topic.
Also, it’s relevant to realize that there are only two types of code, and anyone capable of producing type two and leaving good commit logs will have their name cursed over and over by future developers:
The two types of code:
- Partial solutions that no one uses, or even really remembers, after a few months.
- Horrifying legacy solutions that may yet outlive the developers whose nightmares they haunt.
Sometimes a program in category 1 grows up into a program in category 2, like an eldritch horror caterpillar emerging from it’s cocoon as an eldritch horror octopus porcupine.
Edit 2: But hey, I heard AI is going to take care of all the coding soon. So that will be nice.
