I’m fortunate to be paid well for doing something I love. But I know quite a few developers for whom software development is not a joy, but a job. Nothing inherently wrong with that, and in fact, I think it’s inevitable as the craft matures. Even so, I’m seeing a little too much of certain things lately, for example:
Try blocks with empty catch blocks. The legitimate uses of this little trick are so super-rare that we might as well say it’s Evil. Even when you do it temporarily it’s Evil because you inevitably forget to take it back out. Just cut it out, okay? I’ve seen code, for instance, that loads records into a database, where maybe 20% of the records vanish silently into thin air because some minor, easily fixable exception is masked. Don’t make me come over there.
Failing to do simple things to make code more robust. I’m getting a little tired of noobish code that concatenates date strings together and then parses them in the blissful assumption that the code will never be run under any locale other than en-us. It is no harder to just use the DateTime constructor, but people don’t do it because … why?? I really don’t know.
Have a little pride in your work. If you really don’t care … find something you care about and do that instead.
Thanks. Carry on.
