Programmer Humor

In each of us, not two, but three. Paraphrasing Superfast matt, "that was done by past baahb, and he's an idiot, but it matters more to future baahb, and that guy is an asshole."

I was complaining to my friends about how bad the programming was on a project I was wrapping up and then they asked, "Isn't this a personal hobby project?" yes it is.

I love that they called it "blame" lol. They knew what it would be used for.

Been writing the same software for 20+ years now, don't even need git blame to figure out what asshole wrote this shit.

That exact chain of events happened to me at my last job and I audibly laughed realising it was my own code. To my own credit though, it was a file I had written four years prior which at that point was more than half my whole career in the past

Sometimes you don't even recognize your own trash, 6 weeks later.

These days I see so much AI slop that my reaction when I see code I hand-wrote myself is "hey, that's pretty good".

My team's code is great, but we use a lot of shared code written by other teams, with varying levels of quality.

Past me was a moron sometimes.

That comes with experience. I rarely find things I wrote anymore where I could add or remove a comment.

The worst part is when I leave comments and still wonder wtf I was thinking.

Sometimes one does something in a certain way (which would otherwise be a shit way to do it) for very good reasons which are external to the code, be they requirements related, external upstream or downstream systems or due to existing system limitations or deployment environment.

More than a decade ago, I learned that even if one isn't at all prone to put comments in the code, you should add comments for such reasons in that quirky code: months or years later that will yield exactly the reaction of this meme when you or somebody else sees that code (whilst you might remember why you did, somebody else will certainly not)

Maybe even more importantly, it allows other people to actually remove that crap if the reasons behind it don't apply anymore, which they would otherwise not do because they would be fearful that the hacked-together pile of crap was needed for some reason elsewhere they were not aware of so they could not risk refactor it - most long lived codebases out there are riddled with crap which had pretty good reasons to be there back when it was done but it doesn't anymore, but which newer people can't just remove until they've gained a full understanding of the whole code base and how it's wired to the rest (and, even then, there's a risk that the reason is a requirement and if they just remove that code it breaks something that the users expect).

Even if you're the kind of coder that thinks that "the code is self explanatory" (something which, by the way, betrays a lack of experience in the full life-cycle of software that has been in production for years and been worked on by several people) do your future self and others a favor by explaining the choices derived from external reasons ("Why has the auto engineer chosen to put the steering wheel in a British car on the right side?") that led to code design which is NOT explainable by purely internal or good design or coding reasons.

(Or at least make it stupidly clear in the appropriate level of tests, which normally is requirements testing or integration testing)

If you're really good and working in a proper professional environment (most programmer aren't), consider tracing things back to the entries in the software requirements document, use cases or even elements of an use case, at least for the "quirky" choices.

But it would work beautifully, if it would work.

I love when someone opens a bug in my code and I get to "how the hell did this ever work?"

We went out for drinks one night after work. Upon stumbling back to the office, I remembered I had forgotten that I signed up to make a tool page to mange some data ingest. It was due first AM. I was three sheets to the wind. Fired up LAMP stack, took the samples and made an ingest function. Wired up a textbox, tested it and went home.

Next AM, I turned it in, there was a minor bug. No problem, I'll just find the issue and they'll be good to go.

cracked the scripts open...

I could read it. I could see what a lot of it did. I could NOT figure out what some of it was there for. I spent 30m trying to figure out what I was doing. it was only a couple hundred lines. It wasn't even a copy/paste job. Eventually I ran out of time and just leaned into phpdump, and breakpoints to find the exact error. One function hit a bonefied php bug that caused the debug to go silent. large swaths of the code were unreachable due to essentially a couple of typos. The only reason it worked as well as it did was because their sample data was as simple as imaginable. I put on some Nine Inch Nails and just remade it in about 30 minutes (10m before it was absolutely needed)

inventing a new language is almost never the right solution. there was a guy at my last job who tried to do this pretty much every time he ran into a problem with some shitty legacy software he had to work with. rather than take the time to fix it to do what he needed, he took ten times longer to slap another layer of custom bullshit on top of it. ultimately it came down to him being a really shitty engineer too afraid to change existing code, too lazy to do his due diligence, just clever enough to implement a shitty workaround, but not clever enough to realize how shitty it was. everything he made barely worked, was way overcomplicated, and no one else even wanted to try to learn his arcane bullshit syntax.