Your Legacy

CoolBeans: From College to Industry — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 10:47:37 GMT

I'm sure you want to have a legacy. People will remember you and tell stories about what you did and

re: One Liners

Mike Lutz — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 22:01:52 GMT

One way of assessing the quality of your code is to have one of your colleagues critique it. Now I know this can't be done on every class (or even every method), but if folks did this for each other once in awhile everyone's code quality would improve.

Of course, this might be automatic in organizations where code inspections are the norm, but in my experience the dynamic of an inspection meeting militates against such searching critiques. I certainly feel better when I ask a colleague to look at my work and only he (she) and I are privy to the red-ink annotations.

And now to pat myself on the back. In the early 80's I was commissioned to develop a cross assembler for a local firm; the assembler ran on a PDP-11. When the firm upgraded to a Vax, they ported my code and found an error (1! error) related to moving from a 16-bit to 32-bit environment. I went in to help diagnose the problem, and it was pretty easy to resolve.

However, what gave me the greatest pleasure was having the developer working on the assembler comment on how satisfying it was to work on the code, as it was so well organized and documented. Praise from one's peers - can't beat that.