zlacker

>>todsac+(OP)
Not a huge Steve Jobs fanboy, but I always liked his quote[1] about craftsmanship, sweating the details, and giving a fuck:

“When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

I think software as a whole suffers greatly from this "well, I got it barely done, technically fulfilling the requirements, so my work is over" attitude.

1: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/445621-when-you-re-a-carpen...

>>ryandr+n4
I appreciate this analogy, but Jobs made this work by creating a leadership culture that was obsessed with quality and craftsmanship. By all accounts he would regularly refuse to ship hardware and software that wasn't up to his standards and fired people for not building things to the right specifications. In contrast, most of us work in organizations with the exact opposite leadership mentality, namely "get your work done as quickly as possible so we can sell more product, and fudge whatever you have to to make it through quality testing unscathed".

>>quacke+Z4
I said it on here before. I used to be the king of macaroni code. Tiny pieces of spaghetti code - fast running that barely made sense. The technical debt stacked up really quickly but it ran damn fast and got the job done. Kind of stuff that would make people say "How the heck does that work? That is fast though!".

It is a problem of being self taught on projects that only I would use, you would learn some very bad habits. Would also mean making code that you would look back on a few months later and have no idea what you were doing.

If it was for anything other than video games pre-online era, I fear the kind of damage it could have done. It was putting pixels on screen, not running online data bases or via monetary systems.

To that I say, I like the Ps2's/Gamecube memory systems that kind of didn't give a damn how many pointers you threw at it. I would also like to say I learned not to do this, I did not. I just don't code any more.