Little Awful Practices (Serie)

Although I'm not a perfect developer, it's quite common when I start looking code to find some practices that I don't like at all. And I think that's actually the reason (that I am a normal developer) why I find them so quickly and complain about them. Sometimes is my own code and of course sometimes not.

In most cases, these are pieces of code which actually do what they are supposed to, and they do it fine, but are very complicated to manage. Or.. maybe not THAT complicated but still large, in a way that they use a lot of "code space" disturbing the developer's sight, or maybe they hide some bugs that are very difficult to find later. So the thing is that some of these practices are innocent and the effort doesn't worth it to to don't let them live. But others must be killed, though.

Some of these spawns, I guess, are born as a result of having a lot of thing in mind and just not paying enough attention to a particular section of code. That would be the best case, I guess. But unfortunately some of them are just the product of a lack of knowledge, basic knowledge the most time. As I said before: I'm not the great programmer who never make mistakes, I do it, like everybody, but it worth it to pay attention and fix this small bugs once you've seen them. And tell the other developers if you find their bugs (but carefully, because programmers are very susceptible about own bugs ;))

But I must recognize that there is also the case, where we think we found a bad practice... and it's not a bad practice at all! It's actually a solution that we would have done in a different way. "The grass is always greener on the other side" doesn't apply that commonly in programming ;)

Summarizing, the idea of this series is to post and "keep in mind" such practices, as some kind of "don't do it" remainders.