Comments on: The Projector Rule: A Moving Target Code Standard

By: Willem van den Ende

Willem van den Ende — Tue, 11 May 2010 06:16:40 +0000

I have a yes-but-no-but reaction to this (see also: yabitting ). Yes, your code should be good enough that you feel proud when you show it to your colleagues. No, but your code needs the projector the most when you’re so ashamed of it you want to go and hide in a dark corner somewhere…

Your colleagues should always be prepared to help you improve your code. Programming is a learning activity. I write bad code from time to time. That is, I know it sucks at the moment I wrote it, and may have an idea why but don’t know how to make it better. In hindsight my code often sucks, but I just didn’t know any better at the time…

By: Joshua Lewis

Joshua Lewis — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 12:44:37 +0000

Not yet unfortunately
Though I’ve recently run into some more fundamental issues within the team (small design tenets that are missing), so I’m pushing to have some kind of session quite soon.

By: GeePawHill

GeePawHill — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 19:29:16 +0000

Joshua… I’m still trying to think of how the team can work together to a) establish the ever-rising bar, and b) to have fun while doing it. Last time you were talking about projecting some of your own code, to get the ball rolling. Any luck with that? — GeePaw

By: Joshua Lewis

Joshua Lewis — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 15:13:35 +0000

One way I tried to implement some semblance of this was to suggest the (team-owned and imposed) rule of no code promotions without a peer review for readability (I touched on this in my comment to the Lottery Learning post).

I.e. if I’m not positive that I could maintain (read understand) that code should person get run over by a bus, I don’t want it in our QA branch (or even in dev/main). I don’t care about correctness at this point, only readability/understandability.

For me, code readability encapsulates a lot implied by ‘code quality’ or ‘high standard of code’. At the least, for me that’s the starting point, or the absolute minimum.

The way I try to explain this so I don’t across as patronising is to say that I’m quite stupid and the code needs to be easy to understand for a stupid guy like me.

(As mentioned in my comment on Lottery Learning, the suggestion caused a massive debate and was not adopted – which is fine for now.)