This post is going to be so short that I bet, when you finish reading it, you’ll be asking yourself:
Was I reading a blog post or a tweet?
And you’ll be right: this post could probably fit better on a tweet or a Linkedin thread, but hey: it’s my blog, isn’t it?
When I was doing the first draft of this post, believe me, it looked much larger. Then, as luck would have it, I found a pair of sharpened scissors and I started using them. And it has ended like this, one of the easiest posts ever done in the history of blogs.
Smells like ten spirits
This post was originally meant to talk about Code Smells. I was planning to disect Martin Fowler’s main code smells that appear on his famous book on refactoring, when I discovered this amazing post, by Jeff Atwood; so I changed my mind, since Atwood’s post is the best summary of Code smells I’ve seen so far.
But Atwood’s post is just the appetizer. The fact of this post being so short is a tribute not only to a genial author and his masterpiece (Roedy Green, I salute you); it’s also a homage to a way of teaching. Instead of the classical learning by showing what to do, Green’s approach takes the much pragmatical and fun way of learning by showing what NOT to do; this is done by means of sarcastically glorifying the wrong way of doing things, as if it were the dogma to follow.
This is starting to look too long, so I’ll cut to the chase and just share the fountain of (anti)knowledge and laughter that is one of the best technical reads I’ve ever come across in my life. It would be more accurate to describe its didactical approach as learn by laughing. Click here to get free tickets to embark on one of the most psicodelic and hilarious experiences of your professional career. It deserves an Ig Nobel prize. Enjoy!
P.S.: If spaguetti code was a brilliant expression (attributed to Guy Steele), the code smells emanated by Roedy Green’s paper are so powerfully strong, that the resulting code could become the worst and most expensive code to maintain ever. So, should we coin an expression such as Roquefort Cheese code?:
Man, your code is not only spaguetti code; it also smells like Roquefort cheese code.
P.S. 2: yes, the title of this post is also a tribute, to Douglas Adams’s masterpiece The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And the other heading is also a homage, this time to Nirvana’s Smells like teen spirit, with whom I dreamed last night but don’t remember anything about it, as it usually happens with epiphanies, satoris and other human design patterns.
P.S. 3: I know what you’re thinking: wasn’t this post going to be extremely short? As an answer, without setting a precedent, I’ll quote myself:
hey, it’s my blog 🙂
Jacobo Martín
P.S. 4: Still there? Come on, go away and have some laughs elsewhere! Just in case, here is the link again to How to write unmaintainable code.
