I did a talk to a team at work yesterday about #PairProgramming. They’ve been trying it out, but they’re all new to it, so I recommend @LlewellynFalco’s Strong Style Pair Programming.
But while I was digging out some references, I came across this: scribd.com/doc/25304465. It talks about the hit that engineers get from tinkering with code until it works, then moving on.
An episode of @bosslevelpod discussed a similar idea a while ago: itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/bos…. We like social media *because* it is often dull. We seek those rare good tweets.
And when we find a good tweet, we get a small endorphin hit. It’s the same thing gamblers get.
So, as software engineers, we should be aware that our own micro-addiction to endorphins might be leading us down a destructive coding path, leaving a trail of bad code behind us.
.@unclebobmartin talks about a similar idea in Clean Code. Engineers stumble across a solution, but don’t take the time to fully understand it. And now I have an idea *why* that happens.
Tinkering until the code suddenly works, boom, that’s an endorphin hit. Tidying it up, that’s just hard work with no endorphin reward.
It also shows that we shouldn’t just trust engineers to decide on coding practices, based on what they enjoy. They’ll enjoy the gamble. We should aim for code quality first, and look for practices that produce clean code.
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