The Thing About Programming By @LaceySnr

Thoughts inspired by my life as a developer. It's not always so funny for me. Got a question? Head to AskADev.

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The thing about programming is that just when you've finished putting the final pieces in place a new requirement will fall out of the sky and prove all your assumptions incorrect.

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The thing about programming is that if you try and count the days since you last made a stupid mistake, you’ll probably come up with negative one as the answer.

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The thing about programming is that sometimes you have to update your operating system just because a client updated their iPad.

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The thing about programming is that the feeling you get when you can finally reproduce an elusive bug is almost as good as the feeling you get when you squash the bugger.

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The thing about programming is that just when you're about to give up after wasting days trying to make something work, is often the moment you'll come up with an ingenious, and far simpler, solution. Of course, other times you'll just be falling down another rabbit hole of despair.

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The thing about programming is that at some point in your career you'll realise you've lost hours of your life because you copy and pasted code, forgetting to change one character out of a hundred.

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The thing about programming is that if you smell burning you know you've gone really, really wrong.

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The thing about programming is that unless you build everything from scratch, there's nothing to stop the rug being pulled out from under you: One day your code works, the next the world is on fire.

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Thirty Thousand Followers!

Ok, never thought I'd just write a text post, but this genuinely caught me by surprise just now and I wanted to say that you all rock. I've had a heap of supportive notes over the years, along with questions and suggestions (though aside from an early experiement or two I don't use those), and I appreciate all of it.

I know the posts have become more infrequent, though largely I put that down to me making the same mistakes over and over (whoo, fast learner!) and writing about them more than once doesn't make them funnier. Anyway, thank you.

Happy coding!

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The thing about programming is that even when you know there's no such thing as too many parentheses, you'll still run afoul of operator precedence from time to time.

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The thing about programming is that just because you know what line of code is the root cause of a bug, doesn't mean you know how to reproduce that bug, and that's a sucky situation to be in.

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The thing about programming is that you should be wary about any platform that has a marketing budget to promote it.

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The thing about programming is that just when you think you've got the hang of a particular paradigm, it's thrown out because something shinier has come along.

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The thing about programming is the moment somebody mentions that you need to integrate to a third party system is the moment that all best are off with regards to the task completion date.

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The thing about programming is experience doesn't mean you don't create bugs, you just learn to recognise them faster.

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The thing about programming is that you can easily spend more time fixing your build environment due to updates (*cough* Xcode *cough*) than actually writing code.

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The thing about programming is that the moment you fix a bug is the moment you wonder whether you've created an even more subtle and catastrophic one.