Sloppy code. We’ve all seen it, and the problems it can cause. Whether that is not thinking things through fully (ie: no impact assesment), simply being careless and slapdash when it comes to writing code (ie: don’t care or in a rush to get it out), or even the programmer being as thick as two short planks (ie: should be digging holes for a living), the results can be pretty much the same.

I know one ‘programmer’ who doesn’t even compile code after writing it. They just hack it together, check it back in, and sit back with their feet up scoffing pies. Of course more often than not it wouldn’t actually compile, and it needed somebody else to fix their fix. Thus wasting everybody’s time.

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So frighteningly the end of another year is upon us. Where do they go? Still what better way to start 2009 than with a burst of learning some new skills (or even re-learning some old ones), and moving my development focus in a new direction.

A couple of different things have happened recently which have brought about this post. The first one has been a few emails from people asking about the source code for my Net Yaroze game, A Dog Tale, after a video of it was posted to YouTube.

Incidentally, while I’m talking about A Dog Tale, even more bizarre and obscure than somebody posting a video of the game to YouTube, somebody also sent me a link to a Wikipedia page about it. Blimey, does old code never die?

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