[thelist] Bad Code vs Keeping Job

l a u r a *^* l y n c h cyberminkie at cyberwhirled.com
Tue Aug 8 08:47:08 CDT 2000


> I don't think coding style is worth losing a job over.  You're going to
> run into that everywhere.  Sometimes you can make a difference;
> Sometimes you can't; Sometimes it takes some time to win 'em over.  My
> experience is that there are enough people out there who don't care
> about style (usually the same people who have messy
> desks/cubes/offices/apartments) that the best I can do is try to show
> one or two of them the advantages of doing it right the first time.

Note: I'm not arguing -- I appreciate any and all feedback. I do want to
clarify that for me, this is something different than style. Messy coding
style (to me) would be no indents, no comments, no white space between page
elements, etc. I could do that, no problem (okay, I'd put in good style
while I was coding and then go back and un-style it, but same diff). This is
bad, unnecessary code -- and it's something that, IMO, there's really no
excuse for. It's not as if I want to go through all the pages that are
already incorrectly coded and redo them the right way (well, okay, I *do*,
but I'm not making an issue of it). I just want to code pages properly to
begin with. Or as close to properly as the current crop of browsers will
support. And while I do like my job, I'm sure that someday I'll want another
one, and I'll want to be able to show people code that I wrote for the site.
I want it to be the best code I can write. Maybe I'm answering my own
question here -- I do feel really strongly that there is no excuse for
bad/lazy/unnecessary code (other than 'I didn't know any better' followed
quickly by 'but now that you've shown me the light, I'll redo it'). And I
think I might just feel strongly enough about it that I'll refuse to write
it that way. Hmmm. Guess it's time to start hitting the job sites again. :(

l a u r a *^* l y n c h
design doyen @ c y b e r w h i r l e d
http://www.cyberwhirled.com
ICQ: 1797450  AIM: cyberminkie





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