Great days at work are fun

My job has been hectic for over a year, with schedules missed, money tight, etc. Things are coming to a head, one way or the other, but the work remains interesting and exciting.

Today, I took a list of must-have fixes and got my two done. Not only that, but in the process, sped movie playback up 70% by eliminating a lot of extra processing and also fixing some glaring bugs.

It is interesting how projects go from cobbled up demos to real code – For me over the last year, I’ve learned that documenting your intentions – What you mean to do, verus relying on the code to speak for itself is essential. The code lies far too often – Either because of a bug, or a rushed demo, etc. Self documenting code forces the engineer reading the code to infer what you meant, and this often leads to even more headaches and time lost.

So I’m going to start documenting my code much more. I was thinking – Wouldn’t it be nice if we had line-by-line comment source control? meaning, you could comment a line of code, and have it disappear. These comments would follow the code through cut/paste, etc, and could be shown via tooltip or some other UI.

I have no idea how to implement this in a text based world, but it sure is intriguing to me. Often engineers say they hate reading through the comments, but if you could comment, have it disappear but always refer to it later, I think we’d end up with much better code.

As for me, having my movies on thumbnails code I wrote in June but could not use until my movie rework was done in December just work was quite satisfying. And now that movies play across pages and while resizing is a really nice end to my day.