Buy Bad Code Offsets Today!

Jeff Atwood

19 Nov 2009 — 2 min read — Comments

But not every programmer does something about the bad code they’re polluting the world with, day in and day out. There’s a whole universe of possibilities:

But that’s a lot of work. Really freaking hard work! Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do something a bit simpler and easier to, just... say... offset the bad code you’re producing?

Well, now you can – with Bad Code Offsets.

I am a proud member of the Alliance for Code Excellence, and this is our vision:

We envision a world where software runs cleanly and correctly as it simplifies, enhances and enriches our day to day work and home lives. Mitigating the scope and negative impact of bad code on our jobs, our lives and our world is our all-consuming passion. We foresee a time when bad coding practices and their rotten fruits have been eliminated from this earth and its server farms thereby heralding a new age of software brilliance and efficacy.

Nettlesome bugs and poorly written code have been constant impediments towards realizing our full potential as programmers and engineers. Bad Code Offsets provides the vehicle for balancing the scales of poor past practice while freeing us to pursue current excellence in code development. Until the dawn of the worldwide, bug free code base, each of us can take steps towards reducing our bad code footprint and remediate the bad code that we have each individually and collectively left behind on the desktops, servers and mainframes at school, at work and at home.

Yes, this is partly tongue in cheek, but we aren’t just doing it for the lulz. Bad code offsets cost real money, because the Alliance has a goal:

Q: Where does my money go?

A: The proceeds from the sale of Bad Code Offsets are donated to various worthy Open Source initiatives that are carrying the fight against bad code on a daily basis. These organizations include:

jQuery

PostgreSQL

The Apache Software Foundation

This is the awesome part: the money you spend on Bad Code Offsets really does offset bad code!

All the money spent on bad code offsets goes directly to open source projects that actively make programmers’ lives better. For every ten thousand lines of mind-bendingly bad code produced, we hope to subsidize a thousand lines of quality open source code.

So, please – buy bad code offsets today. It is, quite literally, the least you could do.

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