Quick Funny Story

I knew this guy while I was cooping at this place, people and places will remain anon, so lets call him Watts I and the place MSB. Anyway Watts told me this funny story about how he would play jokes on the System Testers (people who get played lots of money to sit at a computer and break things) while he was a Developer (uses 1’s and 0’s to make the computer do stuff) writing the software. So just before release he fixed a bug, but added a neat feature-everytime the user would perform a particular action it would pop-up a message stating “Please enter a quarter to continue”, you click ‘Ok’ and it goes away. Funny part is the System Testers were too busy counting their money to retest the new functionality and it went into production. Needless to say the ending wasn’t pretty, though Watts is still a great guy.

I was a tester at the time and yeah, we caught all his bugs/enhancements. Never become a tester unless you like boring repetitive tasks, that is all.

Benjamin Willis

(I should prolly have some links in here to help my page rank or something so here is youtube and getitnext for your tech software deals)

Code Biography

Throughout school (any major with programming really) there are many basic rules when coding like, keep things modular, use version control or comment your code. I want to mention a few bits about commenting:

First off, self commenting/documenting code is bs-99% of the time it is barely self documenting to the person who wrote it. Yeah, I might get flamed about this if people (the noob coders in general – *benjamin adds fuel to the fire) read my blog but I have not run into any code, save hello world tutorials, that was easily readable when uncommented. I have heard quotes of people, students in particular, who have claimed that not commenting is a great way for job security, which totally makes me ill-but again reiterates my thoughts.

Secondly, projects barely leave time for commenting. Yes, you could do it along the way, but if you had code/design which you did not have to re-visited hen you had too much time for a project or you were writing that hello world tutorial.

Thirdly, yeah this seems like a bitch and moan post, but there is something I do like about the little commenting that is done within a project. The best part about it is the personal notes which are put into the code, I know I do it all the time. Funnier quotes are those which claim a function isn’t working correctly and you don’t know if the function isn’t working or it wasn’t ever taken out-be it you or code you are maintaining. The error messages which state “Please Contact your Administrator” are always good for a laugh if you are not tearing your hair out atm. In web programming I have had my share of angry (now humorous) comments with browser compatibility, but I won’t name names (cough…IE…).

So, in closing-I think the left over comments are great fun seeing the life of a project (good luck maintaining them), perfect comments for the easy code that was written the first week of development, shifty-sometimes outright wrong comments for the majority of the code and those special functions that don’t ever seem to work right /* son of a #@*#@# i hate this &*!^@%# job*/.

Benjamin Willis

P.S. Overcommenting is teh suck.

P.S.S. Teachers don’t understand industry (yes, i did generalize the entire educational world)