The mistakes that really frighten me though are the ones that I did not expect; the ones where the unintended consequences run rampant throughout the system like a chain-reaction. Those mistakes keep me up at night.
Programmers make mistakes. The nature of our jobs require us to be aware of what is going on in multiple sections of code. We lose track of the state of our program and committed code. We try to pepper our code with comments and reminders of what's going on in a section of code but comments become stale and add to our distraction. We rush and rely on muscle memory to pick up the slack. We deny ourselves areas where we can adequately test code because we feel we need to get things done sooner.
The mistakes that really frighten me though are the ones that I did not expect; the ones where the unintended consequences run rampant throughout the system like a chain-reaction. Those mistakes keep me up at night.
Programmers make mistakes. The nature of our jobs require us to be aware of what is going on in multiple sections of code. We lose track of the state of our program and committed code. We try to pepper our code with comments and reminders of what's going on in a section of code but comments become stale and add to our distraction. We rush and rely on muscle memory to pick up the slack. We deny ourselves areas where we can adequately test code because we feel we need to get things done sooner.