Monday, March 28, 2011

How to Waste Your Time While Programming

Fun ways to kill off programming productivity: 
  • Use lots of spaces.
  • Cram everything together without any spaces.
  • Align code in arbitrary places.
  • Make up really long variable and function names.
  • Make up random variable names that don't match the data.
  • Make up random function names that hide or obscure the code that is executing.
  • Use 1 character variable names.
  • Rewrite the same functions a dozen or so times.
  • Guess, write some code, toss it out and then guess again...
  • Sit around in meetings every day.
  • Stand around in meetings every day.
  • Avoid all meetings.
  • Procrastinate about getting organized.
  • Get organized about procrastinating. 
  • Get clever (monkeys are clever …)
  • Comment about the obvious aspects of the code.
  • Don't comment about the weirdness of the code.
  • Apply a hastily thought-out patch.
  • Add in extra lines of code in the hopes that somehow, that will make it better.
  • Change everything at the last moment.
  • Continuously ignore a serious problem or miscommunication.
  • Watch someone else type.
  • Write a test for something that would be obvious if it were wrong.
  • Write a test for something that ain’t never going to happen.
  • Write a test to test if a test is working.
  • Re-invent something that has been in textbooks for decades.
  • Rely on something that kinda works, instead of spending the time to build something that actually works.
  • Take technical advice from non-programmers.
  • Ignore domain or usability complaints from the users.
  • Ignore the users.
  • Yell at the users for not being to use unusable software.
  • Assume (pretty much anything).
  • Believe in the marketing documentation, without reading the specs first.
  • Design an ugly user interface (and refuse to believe that it is ugly).
  • Write documentation that absolutely nobody will read and if they did, couldn’t glean any useful information from.
  • Make pretty diagrams. Lots and lots of pretty diagrams.
  • Build something large without a design or blueprints.
  • Build something small and expect it to magically grow into something large.
  • Refuse to provide any information.
  • Provide too much information(s).
  • Wait for the magic to happen.
  • Ignore what everyone else is doing, and get super, super, super creative.
I’m sure there are lots more ...

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thanks for the Feedback!