Comments on: Guilty Developer Syndrome

By: Mike Brown

Mike Brown — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 06:48:59 +0000

Martin Fowler wrote a post about Technical Debt Quadrants (http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebtQuadrant.html) The scenario you’re proposing would most likely fall under the Prudent/Inadvertent Debt (I did the best I could with the knowledge I had but in retrospect I would have done it this way). I think all kinds of alarms should go off if you look back at old code and can’t identify ways to improve it.

That being said, I’ve learned over the years that you need to let go of “your” code. Once you can do that, you’ll be able to learn more because you’ll spend more time discussing a critique than defending your code.

By: Wes Winham

Wes Winham — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 07:41:21 +0000

It's hard to do, but I'm trying to embrace technical debt like in your example. The reality is that if project X served it's purpose, then you really shouldn't feel bad. You could have spent more time on it 6 months ago, but it would have been another trial-and-error learning experience. Coming back with 6 months of experience (and possibly 6 months worth of better 3rd-party tools and libraries), you can improve things a lot more quickly than if you'd just tried to do it "right" the first time. Even more, in that time, it might have become obvious that you didn't even need the internal tool. Of course there's a balance to this thought, but I think good developers probably tend to drastically lean too far to the "perfect now" side. I definitely believe shipping is a feature

By: mileszs

mileszs — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:56:45 +0000

I suppose every developer is in this position at one time or another, but I felt like I may have wrote parts of this for a second, or that perhaps you and I had very candid conversation at Brockway last time.

I work on an internal tool. It’s been around since before Rails version 1.2.3, if I’m not mistaken. It’s been around since before I had an adequate grasp of Ruby or Rails. It was built by myself and another programmer who was just learning Rails. It has some ugly parts. I still apologize for them when working with The New Guy.

The project is a living project that will not soon be put out to pasture. It is basically my job to maintain and improve it. That means I get the opportunity to correct the things for which I feel guilty every day. I think this has proven to be an incredibly valuable (and humbling) learning experience.

Perhaps one shouldn’t feel guilty, but feeling guilty means you’ve learned something. So, relish the emotion as a sign of progress, and then cast it away.

By: MaTT

MaTT — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:29:56 +0000

HAH! This post couldn’t be anymore relevant to my current position. Imagine, if you can, that you worked on a project for the past 3 years. Then, all of the sudden, you are tasked with training someone who you have never met on that product. They are looking at code you have worked on for the past 3 years. There were a few times where they would suggest a different (in their eyes, better) way to do things. But as you’ve stated…at the time, I only knew what I knew then. I never felt guilt when talking about these areas; however, I would feel a little defensive.

Honestly, I think most of my defense comes from the situation that we’ve been put in. But I can most certainly see how a developer would take it personally if someone “attacked” their code. Some of the implementations were called “confusing”…but I think once I was able to put them in the mindset that I was in 1-3 years ago…they understood the decisions that were made.

I’m pretty confident that I could change the way some things were written and improve them. But we got the job done, and it is a very working solution.

p.s. I enjoyed reading this post!!!!