Cleaning Up Someone Else’s Code
This afternoon I've spent a lot of time cleaning up someone else's code. This person is new to the group, and I've been asked to see if he will fit into the project. I do have my doubts...
I had him put in a few tests and write a few methods on an existing class. This wasn't meant to be hard, it was meant to be easy, but it turned out to be something that I needed to be more explicit about.
The code was an interesting combination of decent STL C++ code, but completely optimistic, and no comments to speak of. Those comments that were there weren't even complete sentences. While I'm not an english major, I think the comments are the only real help that an author gives to the person trying to figure out what they did. Many think of this as a weakness, but I know better. I'm often the one that reads what I wrote 6 to 9 months after the fact, and I'd like to cut my future self a little slack.
So I had to not only re-arrange things, and comment them, I also had to remove the optimism of the original code, and in many cases, improve the speed as the use of some STL ideas is fine if speed isn't an issue, but in a ticker plant, that's just simply not the case.
What I have come to realize is that the new guy is not all that great a coder. With all the examples they had to work with, they wrote code that was completely out of context with the rest of the class. This shows a real lack of awareness to me. We'll see how he progresses in the coming days.