WTF?
November 21, 2007
Ever written a bit of software, looked at it the next day, then not been able to figure out what the hell you were doing?
If I didn’t somehow forget to save after the last compile, it looks to me as if the odd captured data from last night is complete garbage, because I was feeding the SPI data straight into the MAX232. That… I don’t know how I could have gotten that wrong.
Yes.
Especially when I was working on Z80 asm stuff. I’d often write a chunk of code, then come back to it the next day because it wasn’t working quite right, and I just couldn’t grasp what was going on with it… so i’d just wipe the block of text and start over from scratch.
With asm, the hard part is that you don’t have descriptive names for variables, since you only have register names.
Since then, i’ve found that excessive use of comments helps… A LOT.
Yes, back in college and in DEC assembly…mostly late night coding marathons (procrastination)…what’s even worse is having it work and not recalling how…
I can’t believe how stupid I was with it. I think that the mistake I see / made might make me need to take back the first half of this post.
In one of the projects i was working on I had a block of code that, when i revisited the code, i realized that I not only had no idea what it was supposed to be doing, but I had no idea what it was actually doing either.
because this amused me so much, i left the block of code in, but just commented it out and left that note for myself… hehe.
If you can’t remember what you did and the software works it usually means you been ‘in the zone’ when you wrote it :) Being a professional developer I try to use all meaning variable names, functions and whatnot. But when I’m in the zone I write my code fast and use very short variable names and the code is very cryptic. It’s probably the most efficient piece of code I write. The last 2 weeks has been like this at work and the guys who working on pieces of code I left over is probably feeling your the pain your feeling… hehe.
Thankfully I know what is wrong. I think I’ll try and sort it our Friday or something. The difficulties I’ll encounter in trying to RE the Honda protocol are still there, but it’s at least feasable now.