[ale] Wandering into the OT tar pit

[Geoffrey]

Mills, John M. wrote:

> We probably all have favorite 'war stories' about projects gone wrong. I
> keep telling myself, "Design first, code later" but I am too easily
> tempted to just start typing.

I'm just the opposite.  I spend tons of time researching and designing. 
  I always want the right solution, and I hate when you find out half 
way through the project, you've chosen the wrong tools or wrong design. 
  I had a supervisor at AT&T who used to call me up and ask me 'do we 
have any code yet?' :)

I'll have notes and pseudocode and code snippets all over the place.
The bad thing about it, is it's not very organized for anyone else to 
pick up.  I always tell myself I'll put it all together in a single 
document, but that never happens.

> Legacy code with no documentation is a nightmare of "push it down here
> and it comes right back up over there!"

Been there, done that.  It's the nightmare of taking over someone else's 
  code.

-- 
Until later, Geoffrey