code maintenance

software development practices

Coding For Violent Psychopaths

Today's rumination is not for the weak of heart. It's from the venerable C2 Wiki page Code For The Maintainer: Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live. Perhaps a little over the

By Jeff Atwood ·
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programming languages

Size Is The Enemy

Steve Yegge's latest, Code's Worst Enemy, is like all of his posts: rich, rewarding, and ridiculously freaking long. Steve doesn't write often, but when he does, it's a doozy. As I mentioned a year ago, I've started a cottage industry

By Jeff Atwood ·
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software development concepts

The Broken Window Theory

In a previous entry [https://blog.codinghorror.com/pragmatic-programming/], I touched on the broken window theory. You might be familiar with the Pragmatic Progammers' take on this [http://www.artima.com/intv/fixit.html]: > Don't leave "broken windows" (bad designs, wrong decisions, or poor

By Jeff Atwood ·
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code organization

The Joy of Deletion

I generally dislike these kinds of “Me, too!” posts, but I have to make an exception for Ned Batchelder’s excellent blog entry on deleting code. I’ve often run into this phenomenon with other developers, and it bugged the heck out of me, although I couldn’t quantify exactly

By Jeff Atwood ·
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