http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4111/dirty_coding_tricks.php

I especially like the last one.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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On Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:03:50 -0700, Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:

>I especially like the last one.

It's the same as what you do with deadlines isn't? When asked how long a job
will take you never say what you really think. 
-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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Stephen wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:03:50 -0700, Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> 
>> I especially like the last one.
> 
> It's the same as what you do with deadlines isn't? When asked how long a job
> will take you never say what you really think. 

That's just good planning :)

Hofstadter's law: It will always take longer than you expect, even when 
you account for Hofstadter's law.

...Chambers

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> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4111/dirty_coding_tricks.php
>
> I especially like the last one.

I like the second one too.

I think in any industry where you have complex projects that need to be 
finished by a deadline there will always be less-than-optimal hacks to get 
it "finished".  Usually if you had more time there would be a number of 
things you could do better.

We had a similar situation with an LCD for a car whereby we needed to make 
the red colour more "red" near the end of the project, it would have take a 
huge amount of time and money to make a new mask set for the actual panel, 
so we just put a few red LEDs in the backlight...  To this day if you buy a 
certain model of car you will get an LCD with white and *red* LEDs in the 
backlight to make up for the poor glass performance, I doubt anyone else has 
that curious design :-)

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It burns! IT BURNS!! >_<

I especially like the claims of "every time we added debug code, the bug 
went away". Surely it is impossible to work under such conditions...

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4111/dirty_coding_tricks.php
>
> I especially like the last one.

I prefer the penultimate one - the idea of the comedy developer face in the
corner of the screen getting all grr! when the frame rate drops - made me
chuckle.

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Bill Pragnell wrote:

> I prefer the penultimate one - the idea of the comedy developer face in the
> corner of the screen getting all grr! when the frame rate drops - made me
> chuckle.

Not so much a coding trick as an interesting application of 
psychology... but bizare, all the same. ;-)

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> Surely it is impossible to work under such conditions...

Not impossible, but it should make you realise that developing software for 
profit is quite different than doing it as a hobby.

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scott wrote:
>> Surely it is impossible to work under such conditions...
> 
> Not impossible, but it should make you realise that developing software 
> for profit is quite different than doing it as a hobby.

It certainly makes me realise that I prefer safe languages over 
efficient ones any day of the week. :-P

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Bill Pragnell wrote:
>
> > I prefer the penultimate one - the idea of the comedy developer face in the
> > corner of the screen getting all grr! when the frame rate drops - made me
> > chuckle.
>
> Not so much a coding trick as an interesting application of
> psychology... but bizare, all the same. ;-)

Well, it had to be coded, didn't it? :)
He should have made the angrier faces steadily greener! I guess that would have
taken the edge off the psychology.

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