As developers, our jobs are very stressful, jumping from deadline to deadline, solving difficult problems on a daily basis, and handling clients or project managers' impossible expectations at times.
Yet in the midst of all this chaos, we do find time to indulge in a few guilty pleasures, no one else knows about. And I’m here to spill the beans.
Refactoring
Refactoring is the name of the game baby. Nothing feels better than spending a few hours refactoring everything to make it easier. It doesn’t matter if the code has already been approved, doesn’t even matter that we have more important things to do, sometimes you just gotta take a few hours to move and rename thirty classes because you fucking want to.
Mindless work
We all know how mind consuming our work is, it takes a lot of mental energy, and focus to accomplish any task. And that’s exactly why nothing beats mindless work.
At times I’d copy a big module into a new file, delete every line and comment I don’t need, and just mindlessly read it to understand what in the hell it’s all about.
A task I could have accomplished without all the extra work and steps, by just focusing on the code and figuring it out, but hey, when it’s three in the morning, and you’re too drunk to be bothered, you gotta do, what you gotta do.
Maslow’s Golden Hammer
“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
Developers are creatures of habit, and they tend to use the same known tools to do every project without paying any mind to the constraints. Which in itself is not a very good thing, because if you know that X solves this problem, you shouldn’t use Y just because you’re more familiar with it. But hey, that’s why this article is titled Guilty pleasures, not Best practices.
Playing favorites
Nothing turns a developer on, more than a good debate. Whether it's Android vs iOS, C++ vs Java, Angular vs React, etc, just give us something to sink our teeth in.
We all seem to have a language or a framework we prefer more than the other, and would spend a good amount of time defending, even at the cost of our precious time, because there’s nothing more satisfying than proving the other party wrong, and looking them dead in the eyes as they sweat and squirm because they know they’ve been had.
Also React is better, fight me.
Rebellious coding
We’re all rebels in a certain way, we chose to code because it gave us freedom, heck, I wrote my best lines of code high, drunk, and listening to Led Zeppelin.
To be fair, I suppose that most of us appreciate and see the value behind coding standards and conventions, but I’d bet you anything, that each of us has a long list of times they disregarded the standards, to build something the correct way, at least our version of the correct way.
At the end of the day, we’re all humans, we have our guidelines, but we like to mix it up from time to time, and even if our process is not perfect, imperfections make us who we are. So go seize the day, and cheers to all the rebels out there.
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Top comments (2)
Why I feel related to that? 😆
You're absolutely right about them being pleasures. In fact, some of them are in my top 10 pleasures of life. So guilty as charged! :D