Do you get emotionally invested in your code?

dalecosp

Here's one for ya. Do you feel like you get too emotionally tied to your work/code?

Interesting one today. Another team member who isn't trained in much programming or markup at all has been getting some HTML assignments. I've been trying to help but only as a resource when they are "hung" on something.

Today they put up a page on one of our main sites and then seemed confused that the font styles weren't what they had been used to, because they don't know much about CSS.

This ended up leading to a discussion between the two of us, and the VP of IT who was nearby at the time on whether serif-fonts were good for use on web pages. My contention is that with the exception of certain newly-developed fonts and the 3.0 look, they aren't. The other person contended that they had learned printing 30 years ago and serif fonts were more legible. I countered that print was 1000 dpi and screens were 100 dpi and that eBay, Newegg, and Amazon are all sans-serif about the same time that I realized that I was sitting in the hearing of about 8 people engaging in holy war with a graphics designer about Tahoma vs. Times New Roman ....! :eek:

I totally hated this, and felt terrible and fairly hacked-off for the rest of the day (fortunately I had plenty of tickets to work, a good set of earbuds and Spotify). I'm actually still think I'm a bit upset about it and on the drive home realized I'd been thinking if I could hack together a JS tidbit that would override any explicit inline CSS on all page elements ;-)

Does this sort of thing ever happen to you? How do you handle it?

Oh, and I'm right, aren't I? 😃

Elizabeth

waves to dalecosp from the cheap seats

I'd say letting emotions into discussion is inevitable; we're not robots after all. It just means you care, and that you're an actual human being, just like the other person. 🙂

dalecosp wrote:
Oh, and I'm right, aren't I?

According to this, you're both right. 😉

Now it's time for some weekend relaxing and worrying about other things. (For instance, what kind of beer you're going to have next. It's very important.)

dalecosp

Well, how nice to see you back here, Queen Elizabeth!

I think the important question has one answer: root. After all, I'm root on the servers, right? Which means that ultimately I can have it my way:

$root@server: chown root www/default.css && chmod 644 www/default.css

However, I've been trying to lose some weight, so it may have to be diet root beer. Perhaps I can change all my databases to SQLite, too?

My issue is this: We have this site I've been working to improve for over 4 years, and boy, has it improved! I mean, the trendlines are all so much better than either the economy in general or the rate of salary raises that any of us have been getting ... and now this person that's worked there a couple of years and doesn't know beans about what I've done or how to do what I do, and doesn't think about a stylesheet and millions of pages that are all in sans-serif, and because this person (I didn't say "she" yet, did I? Because not all women are that dumb, see the wonderful(!) wise-crack above for proof-of-concept... and some guys are dumb too, so it might be a "he" ... I know some GD's who are "he" types 😉 ) wants a file that she created to show up underneath the site's sans-serif headers with serif fonts, I'm supposed to roll over and not say anything.

I think what I'll say is ... "I don't really need too many of y'all as references for my online resume." 😉

NogDog

Ideally, there should be one person with ultimate say on the visual design of the site. That person, also ideally, should be willing to listen to all interested parties' opinions; but once that listening has been done and that person makes a decision, those of us responsible for implementing those decisions should abide by it. If we're absolutely positive that (a) that person is wrong and (b) it really matters, we can take the issue up the chain of command -- with some sort of solid evidence as to why that decision would be bad for the company's bottom line.

Now, less than ideally but probably all too common, is a lack of centralized authority on such things, in which case it may be the strongest personality that wins -- which is not by any means a way of guaranteeing the best outcome.

In either case, choose your battles carefully, and avoid winning minor battles at the expense of losing major ones. (And I'm not saying this particular battle is major or minor, just that you need to make that decision yourself so you can objectively decide how much it matters whether you win it or lose it.)

dalecosp

Thanks for the comment. Rant here has been deleted in case someone in HR at some other company figures out who I am 😉

Had a talk with my brother about this; I've got an idea of some things I can do. Thanks, both of y'all.

cretaceous

I studied typography but, meh, you can mix it up if you know what you're doing.
Times is boring as hell and ugly on screen - Georgia's really nice as a screen font.
Serif - justified - never all in caps - is much easier to read in large amounts on paper.

I now work a lot for other designers, most...hmm.. ok some.. of whom are much better designers than myself .
But there's one who is rubbish at design - but he's a semi business partner of mine, so I get really cross when he messes up my precision layed out pages with some crappy stuff he thinks is cool cos it looks like his dumb iPhone. He's an idiot though.
Ah, I feel much better now...

dalecosp

cretaceous;11047561 wrote:
Ah, I feel much better now...

Me, too:

if ( $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] != $ip_of_office_firewall ) {
   ?><script>
function badTimes() {
   eles = new Array('p','td','tr','ul','li','table','span','div','a','h1','h2','h3','h4','h5');
   for (i=0; i< eles.length; ++i) {
      this_element = eles[i];
      jQuery(this_element).css("fontFamily","Tahoma,Arial,Sans");
   }
};
badTimes();
</script>
<?php
}

:evilgrin:

Bonesnap

dalecosp wrote:
Do you get emotionally invested in your code?

Yes, quite a bit. I've always been told not to, that each job or project is "just a number", but then I feel like my work isn't up to par if I didn't care. I always want to improve and write better code than the previous project, so if I didn't care then I would just copy and paste as much as I could and change variable names (or don't even do that). I'd rather not do that. I see guys here doing that. Some of them are copying and pasting code that was written more than 4 years ago. They don't even know what some of it does; they just know if they copy and paste it from their previous project, change around some variable names and parameters, then it "works". That drives me nuts. Don't get me wrong, I have my "boilerplate" code like anyone else, but it's just that - boilerplate and nothing more.

Some here may recall a thread a while ago where I posted about a heated debate between myself and my boss about top-level menus and whether they should click to a page. In fact we sort of revisited that issue here at work earlier this week but I made sure to keep myself calm and got back to work before it got very involved.

cluelessPHP

All the time, I won't repeat what I put in some of my echo statements when something isn't working for me :evilgrin: