For the first couple years I was doing development work, whenever I found a problem with my code that noone else had caught, I always tried to sneak out a fix under the radar. I now say with much more experience and 20/20 hindsight, I was a friggin’ idiot.
I wasn’t fooling anybody, all systems designed and implemented by man are susceptible to catastrophic failures, anyone would stopped even for a second would immediately realize that. By trying to brush them under the rug and pretty like they never happened, I was doing myself a disservice. The first place I end up looking whenever I start a new project is my past, and by hiding my previous flubs, the chance of me pulling the same bone-headed move again kept going up and up. By sucking up my pride and making notes of where I had gone wrong in the past, it’s been a boon in a number of ways:
- I only make a mission critical error requiring me to sleep at my desk once. Usually.
- Anyone else who reads or uses my code can hopefully avoid a couple of late night sessions of their own head scratching.
- It proves to the world that a real live person wrote and is actively maintaining the site/tool/app, and moreover that they are continually looking for ways to make it better and enhance the experience.
- Also it serves as notice of common points of failure to watch out for in future endeavors. (ie: always sanitize every field you let a user fill into their profile).
This “revelation” came to me when I was fixing a pair of pants. I used to routinely skip wearing a belt and thusly blew buttons off my fly left and right. After a couple years of patching them up with nicely matching thread, and subsequently popping them right back off my trousers, I had enough and needed to find a better way. I figured if I cared enough to put the effort into continually fixing them, there was no reason to hide that, so I switched over to bright orange and hot pink thread. Almost immediately I stopped trashing clothing because the trigger of seeing where I had gone wrong in the past, and reminded me to put on a belt.
So, I say to you, relish in your botches, slip ups and fubars. Hem your pants in lime green and you’ll stop buying stuff a size too large, in more ways that one.
