Chan's Personal Blog

Yes, I know I'm behind in posting my photos, but my goal is to post all of my 2008 photos before the year is finished. In either case, here's some photos from the Yahoo! SearchMonkey launch party back in May. This is the first launch party that I've attended where it featured a project that I was working on. Enjoy the photos, and I also have included an accompany sound track if you'd like. (I was too lazy to build my own Flash slideshow with music).






For more information, you can check out the Yahoo Search Blog entry entitled, "The Party May Be Over, But the Monkeying Has Just Begun", and as a bonus, they have a photo of me on there as well. For the geeks, you can check out http://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/.

Through my journey as a programmer, I've seen quite a lot of ugly programming code. I have sampled ugly code from academia, where newbie/junior programmers try to solve problems in a very hacky and ugly way. In industry, I have seen websites that I can hack and break in about 2 minutes.

In either case, a while back, I saw a project fail so epically and brilliantly, that it has infact lowered my expectations of programmers. Viewer discretion is advised to my non-geek audience, I'm going to be switching my dialect to nerdspeak, so if you don't understand it, I advise you come back another day. For your viewing pleasure, I have uploaded some pictures that you can check out in my Flickr feed.

So this guy had been working on this critical project for about two months. However, the longer the project went, the buggier the program became. This is usually a bad sign because bug reports should actually start to go down as a project approaches completion.

Some of his team members complained that the code was overly complex, but he balked at the assertion, and just thought that his team members didn't have the same programming experience as he did.

When the alarm bells started going off that the project was no where near finished, and it was getting buggier by the day, management decided to step in to figure out what was going on. A fairly senior programmer stepped in to review the code to see what was wrong.