Sparse matrix


I’m sure that some of you might get the allusion in my title today. Sadly it refers to my posting calendar below. Things are happening all the time that I could comment on, but alas - I don’t. I’m not sure exactly why that is. I have been busy with work lately - both coop and freelance. And while I love my website and I love echo, if I see another damn content management system I am going to explode. Sure, you might think to yourself that that would be pretty cool, if that was all it took for me to explode, but I warn you - this is no laughing matter.

I spent most of my day today losing faith in humanity - more specifically - people in computer science. I mean, I saw some plain awful code today. Some of it I wasn’t seeing for the first time, so I have been slowly losing faith - but I think that today was the last straw. That being said, I did spend a lot of the day re-writing old, bad code. I think it might be wise for me to go through some of the code that I wrote today and edit my comments - sometime when I’m not so pissed at everyone. Efficiency is one of those things that got under my skin today. I re-wrote a script that used to connect to a database literally 900+ times. (Actually making the socket connection each and every time.) I changed in so that it now only connects once. Sure - I think that there are the same number of queries, but that was necessary to keep the job under 5 hours. :P Don’t get me wrong, I realize that everyone gets lazy with checking for efficiency, but being this inefficient must have taken significant effort. The worst part is that for most of all the terrible code that I see from day to day, I know who it is that wrote it. I don’t think any less of these people, but I’m more or less bitter because it means more work for me generally. Sorry if I offended anyone with this rant, but it needed to be said. If anyone wants some pointers on coding styles and practices, let me know. Hint #1: Indent properly.

Written by Colin Bate