Programming Things I Wish I Knew Earlier

theodp writes "Raw intellect ain't always all it's cracked up to be, advises Ted Dziuba in his introduction to Programming Things I Wish I Knew Earlier, so don't be too stubborn to learn the things that can save you from the headaches of over-engineering. Here's some sample how-to-avoid-over-complicating-things advice: 'If Linux can do it, you shouldn't. Don't use Hadoop MapReduce until you have a solid reason why xargs won't solve your problem. Don't implement your own lockservice when Linux's advisory file locking works just fine. Don't do image processing work with PIL unless you have proven that command-line ImageMagick won't do the job. Modern Linux distributions are capable of a lot, and most hard problems are already solved for you. You just need to know where to look.' Any cautionary tips you'd like to share from your own experience?"

Comments

Re:Comment your code

[Anonymous Coward]

Put enough comments in your code so that five years from now you (and others) can remember what you indented the code to do

I indented the code to make it readable. That's so obvious I don't need a comment to remind me.

Re:Comment your code

[DMiax]

Put enough comments in your code so that five years from now you (and others) can remember what you indented the code to do.

I know, Python right?

Re:Comment your code

[TeknoHog]

Put enough comments in your code so that five years from now you (and others) can remember what you indented the code to do

I indented the code to make it readable. That's so obvious I don't need a comment to remind me.

(pun indented)

Re:Comment your code

[gringer]

// the following code delivers cake to the subject

// the above comment explains the joke

== changelog ==
* removed redundant comments