Funny benefits of being a solo programmer
Sometimes there are great benefits of being a solo programmer. When you are working with someone or with a team, it’s a great way to learn from your peers, however, when you are flying solo and you have your own product, you can own it however you want. Here’s a very silly and funny!! example.
I have a Coin mechanism in my app. The user either gets coins or pays a little more and get unlimited downloads (or coins — however you wanna put it) The great thing about these lines of code is, it looks very amateur. And I love this.
//this guy suckz
I think every programmer should admit that when writing code, we love writing silly comments from time to time. Even if you are flying solo, after your fix/workaround/little hack/mojo works, you go back and refactor your code and get rid of unnecessary console print statements, breakpoints and comments like these. (Pretty sure I’m the only weirdo) But these kinds of comments keep things a little entertaining if you are bored/stressed about anything. It’s a way of talking to yourself and keeping yourself entertained. Now these eventually gets replaced by meaningful comments (most of the time — OK sometimes) but they are good while they last.
I played a little StarCraft II with a friend today and I kept hearing this little phrase over and over, so it got stuck in my head. In my app I’m dealing with coins, which is basically the main resource for the app, and minerals are the main resource in SC II. Our brains make these little connections because even the most boring person has ‘Self-enhancing style humor’ rooted in their brains. When you are in your top gear and doing work for a long time, brain kicks in at the most productive time ever and tries to make work fun without distracting you. It’s an amazing phenomenon. If you are working with a team, there’s no way you are going to name this UIAlert notEnoughMineralsAlert. But when you are the only programmer and the project will not be taken over by someone else or be made open source, you can do whatever the hell you want.
OCD kicks in?
After we have our little fun, for me, a little bit of OCD kicks in and I change the comments, I write ‘too perfect’ comments and scan the document for any refactoring I can do, try to keep things DRY (right now it’s a hot mess, I’ll give myself couple hours to make it as DRY as possible). Sometimes for other people, they don’t care. They’re perfectly OK with writing comments like // ughh this shit doesn’t really work so this is a quick hack. || And they never change those. I can’t live like that, but I admire people who can. They really benefit from being a solo developer, as they are independent in what they do.
