"And you trust it to do that?" (another Eclipse anecdote)

An old friend stopped by the office today for an interview. During the Q&A I showed him Eclipse, and I explained some of the refactoring features. "This one," I said, "let's you move a method from one class to another, and all the dependencies are automatically updated." His response was, "And you trust it to do that!?" It just makes me wonder what sort of shoddy IDE's he's been using at his current job. Ha ha!

Ch-ch-ch-changes

This morning my colleague and I were discussing some code he had recently committed. Since we are both working on intertwined projects, I found myself stepping over (and into) his code, and when I noticed his "style" of doing things differed slightly from mine, I called him on it.

In the end, he made some changes, and I made some changes, and the topic of what to do about legacy inconsistencies came up, and he offered up this gem:

My philosophy is:
1) Change what you do in the future first.
2) If time permits, and the change is easy, change code at or near code that you're already working on next.
3) If you're dying of boredom, change old (unused?) code that's not being worked on.

I can agree with that. It's essentially what I already do, but seeing it in writing made it somehow more officious. It's department policy material if I ever saw some.

"If it ain't broke" (an Eclipse story)

Here's a little anecdote in relation to one of my old rants, heavily edited to clean up the vulgar language and abyssal spelling and grammar mistakes I sometimes make over instant messaging...

Kanook, "I get a warm fuzzy feeling every time Eclipse correctly guesses which variables to use as parameters when AutoCompleting a method call."

Trak3r, "Yeah Eclipse is the bomb; I am SO glad we switched."

Kanook, "I suggest a new credo: If it ain't broke, you probably don't know how broke it really is."

I have to admit, he makes a good point.

SpaceShipOne captures X Prize

They did it! They actually did it. They spent $30m to win a $10m prize, but an amazing precedent has been set. A small team of eccentrics with incredible talent and a tight budget proved that space exploration doesn't require a million-man agency with a trillion dollar budget.

This parable translates to the software industry as well. The similarity to my current situation is almost comical. My current company (small, cheap, and successful) compared to my last company (big, expensive, stagnant) is night and day. Companies can grow so big and so bureaucratic that they can no longer get anything done. Sometimes it takes a small, talented, ambitious, and focused team to shake things up a little.