Here we are! This is the second article from my series explaining how to succeed with your side projects. The first part is here. I’m sure by know you read the first part every time you go to bed so you won’t have difficulties to link it to this article. If not, I would advise you to read it. Otherwise the benefit you can get from this article won’t be as valuable. »
Let’s build your new development home Some years ago I was using Ubuntu. It was easy to install and easy to use. I mostly used Windows in my computing life and Unity was feeling similar. At least to me. It was not perfect though: Weird display bugs was popping from time to time. I always felt Unity pretty slow. I had to compile manually a lot of applications not available in the official repositories. »
It’s 2am. Your eyes are tired, you know you’re coding nonsense but you can’t look away from your computer. With a shacking hand you catch a bottle containing a mix of sugar and caffeine. This horrible bug in your code won’t let you in peace till you destroy it. You spent five hours non stop on it. But still, you don’t see the end of the nightmare. Your bed call you, but you don’t listen. »
Oh no! Your boss asked you to fix a bug which crash the company’s website on production. As quick as a jaguar you open the classes responsible of the maelstrom. They were coded by Dave, your colleague developer. The classes are full of formatting errors, poor indentation and weird one letter variables. There are so many dependencies you need to scroll down for minutes to escape the bloated constructor. »
Last update: 2018-08-09 I know what you are thinking: “Again a boring article on DRY? Don’t we have enough already?”. You might be right. However I see too many developers (junior or senior) applying DRY like they are doing some witch hunting. Totally randomly or everywhere they can. So apparently we never have enough DRY principle articles on Internet. A little reminder for those in the back who don’t follow: the DRY principle means “Don’t Repeat Yourself” and was first introduced in the The Pragmatic Programmer. »