Noodlings

While working on the most recent patch to Hazel, I stumbled across some code that made me scratch my head. It seemed the code was unnecessary and was causing the bug I was trying to fix. I ended up removing that code while doing the fix thinking I must have been drunk/high/had a gun to my head when I wrote that code originally. Initial tests seemed to confirm it as things were working at first. A couple days later I discovered an older bug had resurfaced. Sure enough, I began to realize why I wrote that odd piece of code back when. I ended up backing out my recent changes and making the fix with the original code intact. I also made another change which was to comment the code explaining why the hell I wrote it that way in the first place.

[self now] != [self future]

One of the nice things about being a solo developer is that you don’t have to deal with the overhead involved when working on a team. You don’t have issues with miscommunication that you would when working with others. Or do you? Like it or not, you are still a team. Sure, you probably don’t need to communicate things with someone else about a current issue, but you, yourself, now, is not the same person as yourself a year from now. You’ll find many times that intentions are lost through the annals of time so documenting things as if there are other programmers on your team is a worthy exercise. Comment your code. Write descriptive commit messages. Edit your wiki. Your future self will thank you for it.