Comments on: The * stupidest things I’ve done in my programming job

By: Preeti Edul

Preeti Edul — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:35:48 +0000

Nice list! I’ve used EAV, tempting at first, as it can really reduce the programming effort required.. but when its time to test, the devil laughs ;-)

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10 More Ways To Get An Article On DZone — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:16:00 +0000

[...] The * stupidest things I’ve done in my programming job (via cherouvim.com) [...]

By: cherouvim

cherouvim — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:45:10 +0000

@Jeff Burton: You are right, EAV surely has it’s uses and I should have written “Stupidity: using EAV for problems that are solved by a properly normalized database schema design”. Most dynamic websites and basic web applications surely don’t need EAV.

By: Jeff Burton

Jeff Burton — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:02:20 +0000

EAV is stupidity? Maybe sometimes. Maybe most of the time. But: do you understand what problem EAV is intended to solve? Do you have a better solution? If so, tell us.

By: Atanas Palavrov

Atanas Palavrov — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:34:21 +0000

Hehe, I make nearly same ’stupidest things’ last years under .NET ;)
And to be honest, my first was writing in 90s my own MS-DOS GUI from scratch … with low level assembly routines and c++, and to implement C++ exception handling with macros and setjump() on Borland C 3.1 :D
But from other side this is the best way to get deep knowledge in technologies and experience to know how to avoid these mistakes in future …

By: Fabio Brandão - Blog » Blog Archive » As coisas estúpidas feitas quando se trabalha com programação

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:35:19 +0000

[...] Este post foi traduzido e alterado deste link: http://blog.cherouvim.com/the-stupidest-things-ive-done-in-my-programming-job/ [...]

By: TCOP

TCOP — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 08:14:43 +0000

Stupidity is to know you are wrong and never admitting it, leading to the non-ending cycle of repeating the same stupid thing again and again.

Stupidity also is:
leaving the accumilated experience on hard core assembly and demo making!
You rulled man! I miss those days where ‘win’ did not exist and we were exploring asm and interrupts on the black screen. Remember the distance of the simple pc user and us? It was chaotic! :)

You’d better upload some of your hardcore – assembly x86 demos!

By: RaiulBaztepo

RaiulBaztepo — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 22:45:12 +0000

Hello!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language ;)
See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo

By: Marcel Huijkman

Marcel Huijkman — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 07:04:00 +0000

Some say you’re stupid, but you’re smart enough to do something with that knowledge. So I call you smart :-). Everybody has to learn from copying, reinventing, mimicking and so. (That how baby’s survive, and programmers too.) And life is also about lessons learned and how to avoid pitfalls. Of course there are smart people, who don’t make mistakes, but I’ll bet they don’t take any risk also. When you’re in a creative mood, you will sometimes find yourself trapped in a dead-end-situation, or in a didn’t-I-read-this-somewhere-Deja-Vu.
And in the end, there is always something learned.
“A day not learned, is a day not lived.” Keep up the learning (and the sharing) :-)

Greetings from A Dutch guy

By: Raghavan alias Saravanan M

Raghavan alias Saravanan M — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:58:31 +0000

A good and may definitely be useful for the readers!

#1 seems to be sheer stupidity though keeping the credits/knowledge aside.
#2 seems to be a news to me :). Looking at it.

Cheers,
Raghavan alias Saravanan M.

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 22:34:56 +0000

The sad thing is all these people who called you stupid have made mistakes themselves, they’re just too arrogant to realise it. I wouldn’t employ them if they paid me.

By: Ran

Ran — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:14:22 +0000

Yeah, you are stupid.

By: Dimitris Andreou

Dimitris Andreou — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 13:47:23 +0000

@Derek,
There was once some guy that implemented a fancy pop-up style window that was able to display information when someone hovered the mouse over something. It took him about 2 months to fully develop and debug it, and it was horribly slow.

He was quite surprized when he faced the fancy “tooltip” notion.

Swing is, like most ui comprehensive toolkits, very large and easy to miss things, but one must ask himself when creating something generic functionality: isn’t this commonly needed? Because if it is, surely someone must have already done it.

By: Christos

Christos — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 21:39:49 +0000

I have to learn a lot yet as far as all those technologies are concerned but what I realized reading such things (mainly Spring Framework) is that when you develop a project you have to concentrate mainly on the project’s business logic. In most cases all this stuff you will need (ORM, transaction management, Aspect Programming, MVC etc) is already available and you can find what fulfills the main percentage of your needs. When you need something special, I think it’s a better idea just to extend something already used; most of such tools are open source.
Thanks for sharing!

By: Derek

Derek — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 23:10:15 +0000

I wrote a dialog box that would take a String of input once because I missed it in JOptionPane. That got me the title of DialogBoxBuffoon for a few years.

Meh.

By: foo bar

foo bar — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 21:40:43 +0000

IDE’s are overrated. Most of the other points are quite good, although my opinion is that ORM is overrated in general, not just whether you implement your own or use an off the shelf one.

I prefer coding in a simple text editor, doing command line builds that can be scripted, and running automated regression tests.

The best thing about an IDE is a good debugger, and I’m not against ever using an IDE, but Eclipse tends to get in my way more than not, havn’t used Netbeans or other non-MS IDE’s, and Microsoft’s best IDE was Visual Studio 6, they’ve dumbed it down and bloated it up since then, and even VS6 had the (typical Microsoft) defect of using it’s proprietary build settings instead of real makefiles.

Of the other ‘mistakes’, glad to see someone realize the value of a normalized database schema. When you really understand the relational model data access gets much better.

By: Michel Platini

Michel Platini — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:28:59 +0000

Some of those are my mistakes also :-)

By: Denis Richardson

Denis Richardson — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 13:53:10 +0000

The worst kind of developer is the ones that thinks they are smart… even smarter than the rest… And when they are wrong, they are incapable of recognizing it… Even if they did, they could never assume admit that they are wrong… In a million years… even if their own life depended on it. The EGO is simply too large.

Trying to reason with them seem like a waste of time or a never ending battle, a mind struggle… as sort of intellectual competition. It’s unfortunate, but the truth is that they need to smash their own face against the wall to learn… They are incapable of learning from others…. I suppose that works as well… not as efficient, but overtime they will get there… Is it ignorance, stupidity or just plain stubborness…

I must admit, I’m equally fascinated on how some can make such compelling comments on technologies without actual practical experience.

My suggestion to all of them is, try walking a mile over the fence before making such a judgement call. You might even learn something interesting and refreshing.

If NOT well… good luck with the large EGO attitude.

By: Mario

Mario — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 13:48:27 +0000

Are you sure you picked your career well? Perhaps it just wasn’t meant for you. And what idiot allowed you to be the lead and actually make those mistakes in real world projects.

By: Hassan Kamal

Hassan Kamal — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:23:51 +0000

You have definately learnt things instead of just doing them, A “REAL” senior programmer is usualy not there in places where programme desgn level decision
making is required. Its so crucial for a successfull project, this is what makes people
do such mistakes. Its not your fault at all! its the companies fault that they didnt
have an expert for providing solutions to their customers rather they depended
on fresh people so that they dont have to pay them good money

Thanks and regards

By: cherouvim

cherouvim — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 05:42:26 +0000

@SJS: Thanks, very valid comment. Our projects are still tied to NetBeans and yes, this worries me.

@Josh: Yes, you are right.

thanks all for the comments! :)

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Daily del.icio.us for February 8th through February 9th — Vinny Carpenter's blog — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 05:01:23 +0000

[...] ioannis cherouvim » Blog Archive » The * stupidest things I’ve done in my programm… – I’m not ashamed of those sins any more, so here you go [...]

By: Hatem Nassrat

Hatem Nassrat — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 01:35:14 +0000

I think the biggest design mistake for a web app might have been Java.

By: Collin Cusce

Collin Cusce — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:39:49 +0000

Unfortunately, these are things they don’t teach in school. Most developers don’t hear of these sins until they commit them themselves.

It’s ok, we’ve all committed at least one of these at some point *pats your head*.

By: dev-interview

dev-interview — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:23:22 +0000

I know a company that has a full time developer to maintain an .NET ORM and he is fixing bugs most days and hes not close to being done. One can buy a good ORM for .NET applications for under $1K. Do not waste time on writing your own ORM layer code.

gb
http://dev-interview-questions.blogspot.com

By: Sebastian

Sebastian — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:18:51 +0000

Kudos to you for admitting these mistakes. Others will learn from them.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:13:02 +0000

This is a really great resource. Lots of beginners don’t know that these are mistakes, and I think this post can help readers avoid them. I learned many of these the hard way, too. :) Thanks!

By: Josh

Josh — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 23:42:50 +0000

Try messing around with a good one and when you get used to it (2-4 weeks?) you will never look back!

The correct way to say this is:

Try messing with a good one and when you get used to it (2-4 weeks?) you may never look back!

I get frustrated with people who make assertions like this assuming that those of us who eschew IDEs must not have tried them. I have gotten quite familiar at various times with Borland’s old IDE, Visual Studio of various incarnations, and Eclipse.

Personally, I hate them all. We could spend forever talking about why, and why you think the reasons are invalid, and why I don’t think you understand the import of my reasons, etc.

But don’t assume that everyone will have the same response you have.

By: Dave Ross

Dave Ross — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 23:30:18 +0000

I still blame the custom ORM that took up more than half our resources for the downfall of a startup I used to work for. When the company went broke, the ORM still wasn’t complete.

If you’re doing something at home in your spare time, or if you don’t have a deadline/budget to meet, then it’s ok to try rolling your own libraries. But, if time is of the essence, it’s better to use an off-the-shelf solution and focus your energy on your user experience and business logic.

By: Sara

Sara — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 22:54:02 +0000

Nothing is more refreshing than a developer who can admit when he is wrong! Keep rocking.

By: SJS

SJS — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 22:31:47 +0000

Of all the reasons to use an IDE, ‘deploying’ is not one of them. You end up with a system where you can *only* deploy in the IDE, and nobody on the project really understands what needs to be done to deploy the application.

Been there, done that, watched a man-month of code get discarded because of IDE incompatibilities.

You should *always* be able to discard any/all IDEs (or editors — e.g., “requires emacs to compile” is a no-no) and *still* be able to checkout, update, compile, test, deploy, and run your application. The IDE should be a multiplier (something that helps you do something better), not a dependency.

By: web development

web development — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 22:24:37 +0000

Biggest mistake is not to find open source components available for the functions that you want. In short write only once and dont write same code again.

By: Dennis Sellinger

Dennis Sellinger — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 18:38:16 +0000

Bravo! I’ve always said if we don’t do mischief, it likely that we don’t do anything. The important thing is to learn from our mistakes.

cheers.

By: Amine

Amine — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 17:01:34 +0000

This is one reason why to be Sun certified :) In the Sun Certified Enterprise Architect certification, all the needed recommendations are learnt in order to build scalable reliable and secure enterprise information systems.

By: sal

sal — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:45:46 +0000

For years I thought the correct way to write an app was to first build a framework and then build the app on that framework. That way, I could re-use that framework. It never worked out that way. Reuse of the framework almost always ended up with me doing more work in app1 as I tried to complete app2. I look back at my early career wondering how productive I might have been if I just wrote the damn app and look for reuse cases after.

By: Al

Al — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 13:20:29 +0000

You can debug an application with log statements. Sure. But why would you want to? After 15 years of s/w development I still see this kind of nonsense brought up. ‘Star’ developers with hundreds of vi shell sessions open are the guys most likely to commit the list of mistakes posted here.

By: cherouvim

cherouvim — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 12:16:02 +0000

@Dimitris Andreou: Very valid comment ;) Thanks. Building your own MVC framework is a common mistake as well (which I’ve done twice) but a very educational one. Building a CMS on top of that is yet more fun! :)

By: Dimitris Andreou

Dimitris Andreou — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 08:51:29 +0000

That’s the trouble when there is nobody to supervise a freshman. You know, unless you weren’t saying what you were doing or committing code at all, someone should have stopped you, but seemingly none did, so nobody knew better.

Embedding a generic data model into the generic data model the database already provides (while killing query evaluation times in the process) is a recurring issue, which points to the lack of in-depth database courses in some Unis (any course which explains query plans and indices should be protective enough).

Out of curiosity: I see you say that a custom ORM was a bad idea. How about a custom MVC web framework? :)

(I also uploaded other “stupid mistake” stories on my blog: http://code-o-matic.blogspot.com)

By: keer

keer — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 07:35:33 +0000

One of the MOST STUPID things is making mistakes straight from the blog title.

By: icloud

icloud — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 06:55:37 +0000

This is extremely useful! Thanks for sharing!