Recently I was reminded painfully of the fact that habits you
have taken to once hardly ever get laid off.
I usually consider myself someone who tries to write software
after I have thought it through. I do not mean
"over-engineering", "over-abstracting" and
"over-prepare-for-anything-that-might-ever-come'ing". However I
also believe that starting hacking blindly is not a good thing
either. And I try to write "nice" code, even though it might be a
little more work, as long as it is easier to read or just plain
more stable (which is often the same).
Sometimes however, especially under a tight schedule, by force of
habit I (and probably any developer out there) tend to do things
that upon later review make me feel deeply embarrassed. Just so I
did a couple of weeks ago...
I had to write a component that translates data from a legacy
system, stored in plain text files, into a relational database,
accessed through an object …
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