Chapter 24 Diplomatic Immunity

SQL Antipatterns — by Bill Karwin (145 / 164)

👈 Solution: Recover from Errors Gracefully | TOC | Objective: Employ Best Practices 👉

Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, “We’ve always done it this way.” I try to fight that. That’s why I have a clock on my wall that runs counterclockwise.

Rear Adm. Grace Murray Hopper

One of my earliest jobs gave me a lesson in the importance of using software engineering best practices, after a tragic accident left me responsible for an important database application.

I interviewed for a contract job at Hewlett-Packard to develop and maintain an application on UNIX, written in C with HP ALLBASE/SQL. The manager and staff interviewing me told me sadly that their programmer who had worked on that application was killed in a traffic accident. No one else in their department knew how to use UNIX or anything about the application.

After I started the job, I found that the developer had never written documentation or tests for this application, and he never used a source code control system or even code comments. All his code resided in a single directory, including code that was part of the live system, code that was under development, and code that was no longer used.

This project had high technical debt — a consequence of using shortcuts instead of best practices.[32] echnical debt causes risk and extra work in a project until you pay it off by refactoring, testing, and documenting.

I worked for six months to organize and document the code for what was really a fairly modest application, because I had to spend a lot of my time supporting its users and continuing development.

There was obviously no way that I could ask my predecessor to help me come up to speed on the project. The experience really demonstrated the impact of letting technical debt get out of control.

👈 Solution: Recover from Errors Gracefully | TOC | Objective: Employ Best Practices 👉

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