September 4, 2020
“Yeah, it’s a good start... but I don’t think it’s the right approach.”
The year is 2011, it’s my first programming job, and the look in my boss’s face expressed clearly that he was not pleased with my work. He leaned across my desk in the living room of the Palo Alto home where we lived and worked, and gestured loosely towards a region of code on my screen.
“See how you have all those comments explaining this complicated function? That’s a code smell. Ideally you can re-write this so that the code is more self-explanatory and easier to work with.”
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Dan Shipper
