You know what, coding is hard. You’re balancing shifting requirements, a constant stream of new technologies and a hot cup of coffee, all while trying to keep up with your flood of email. When you actually get a minute to code, you sometimes don’t know where to start. Testing is important, but often gets shoved to the bottom of the priority list. This makes for some … interesting code. I love having my code reviewed, but it’s always a humbling experience.
That’s why The Daily WTF resonates with me. You know what? I’m self taught, so I probably have written code that bad. I just hope it wasn’t code someone paid me for. But even in my professional life, I’m sure I’ve written code that caused someone maintaining it later to yell ‘WTF’. Never Vector Oriented Programming, but I have been accused of using HashMap Oriented Programming.
Apart from mistakes anyone beginning could make, there are also folks (we’ve all met them) who just shouldn’t be coding. That’s where this site truly shines: gobs of examples. The Brillant Paula is one great one, among others.
This site is humbling and astonishing. It reminds me of the old chestnut: if your computer was a car; software ‘engineering’ has a long way to go before it truly becomes engineering.
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