Re:Thirteen Years of Bad Game Code
by fapjacks on Friday March 31, 2017 @05:35AM
(#14002270)
Yeah absolutely. I always reduced this to "three months" and passed the phrase around to juniors, etc. And when I interviewed at the last company I worked for, the CEO specifically said, "If you aren't horrified by something you wrote three months ago..." And that's when I knew I wanted to work there (among many other reasons, of course).
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I would worry that this would encourage more tech debt than I'm comfortable with. I already struggle with people shrugging off obviously predictable consequences of their thoughtlessness. I kind of expect people to at least attempt to think three months out. Who knows what we'll be doing in six but cmon.
Do you really look at code you wrote three months ago -- or any code you've just written -- and not see a lot of things you could improve? This isn't about not having foresight or failing to plan or not designing well.
Every time I am about to do a commit, I look at the code and give myself fifteen minutes to make it better. Always have (probably a habit I learned doing homework in college? I'm not quite sure).
In the grand scheme of things you'd hardly notice that it takes me a little bit longer. Over time those improvements become habituated and I just do a lot of them while I'm coding. Especially when I get stuck.
It's not in like cleaning while you cook. Once you have a tempo it hardly takes any longer to prepare the food but you don't leave yourself with a mess that discourages you from doing it again.