We’re back to making blog posts for the capstone project. Term two out of three has begun and I can’t help but feel the same anxieties that I felt from last term (not surprising, more disappointed). I haven’t really adjusted myself towards learning what I actually need to learn in order to fulfill my role in the project, but I’m hoping that I can this weekend before v0.3 is due.
Funny thing about this week’s blog post is that I actually just recently started going back through some of my old projects/assignments that I had to do over the last couple years. On the one hand it blew my mind what I was capable of understanding and creating all on my own; on the other hand, I wondered what happened to make me feel like I couldn’t write up a program like that anymore. Everything was so neat and there was an abundance of comments to help (future) me understand what I was looking at. Robert Martin described reading clean code as being similar to how reading a good book would create pictures in the mind like a movie (Martin, pg. 8). I found that I was able to easily picture what the different areas of code were able to do in my old projects.
The one takeaway for how it feels to look at ‘bad code’ is “wading” (Martin, pg. 3), as Martin describes it “… [slogging] through a morass of tangles brambles and hidden pitfalls” (Martin, pg. 3). This is the feeling that I have when looking at my more modern code, but not at all what I get from looking back on my early coding projects. I think the one thing that would really help is just going back to the basics and brushing up on what helped me become a decent coder. Once I get through that, I feel I can start creating clean-looking code; with comments, and all-encompassing error-handling. Until then, I fear that I am stuck reliving the same habits of thinking that I am incapable and having to rely on other people or tools to get a specific area that I don’t fully understand taken care of.
Works Cited:
Martin, Robert C. Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship. 1st edition, Pearson, 2008