The Painful Price of Becoming Jackie Chan

Re:The Painful Price of Becoming Jackie Chan by yesenadam on Wednesday January 09, 2019 @11:24PM (#18871507)

I didn't realize anyone likes fixing broken code, debugging, or - from reading HN - what seems like what most professional programmers spend most of their time doing, inheriting a huge broken mess of old software and having to come to understand it and clean it up somewhat. I don't remember reading/hearing anyone say they actually like it.

edit: Nice to hear it!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Painful Price of Becoming Jackie Chan by taneq on Thursday January 10, 2019 @12:45AM (#18871797)

Finding and diagnosing bugs is annoying. Actually fixing them is super satisfying though. Same with cleaning up old crusty code, figuring out wtf it's meant to be doing is painful but turning it into clear clean well-factored efficient code is satisfying.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Painful Price of Becoming Jackie Chan by nkingsy on Wednesday January 09, 2019 @11:46PM (#18871592)

Debugging is the best. It feels so good when you stop hitting yourself in the face.

Inheriting a huge mess is harder to love, but refactoring payoffs are huge.

What I will never do again is inherit a huge buggy mess and a boss that wants you to add 5 features to it by the end of the week.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Painful Price of Becoming Jackie Chan by mcv on Thursday January 10, 2019 @08:41AM (#18873702)

I do. I love hunting down bugs and leaving the code better than it was. I've done some memorable refactorings of terrible code. It feels weird to say I like it, but I kinda do.

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Re:The Painful Price of Becoming Jackie Chan by ianmcgowan on Wednesday January 09, 2019 @11:45PM (#18871586)

I love debugging, but only with access to the code. It gets frustrating to track a problem to some black box library, and then have to stop.

[ Parent | on HN ]