Code Comments

Love them or hate them, we can make comments useful

There is a game I used to play growing up called Clue. The premise was simple. You went around a board to different rooms to deduce who murdered the game’s victim, where the crime took place, and which weapon was used.

Favorite game growing up was Code…I mean Clue.

Other than Risk, it was my favorite game as a child. While you could get lucky and just guess the combination early on, the real fun was whittling down the mystery through the clues you gathered. I could put on my detective hat on for an afternoon or evening as I unraveled many paths to get to the truth.

Sometimes reviewing other people’s code can feel the same way, but without the fun. It was not often, but there were instances when I would have to review code because someone was out of the office or I had to integrate to other systems (in the days before microservices and well structured API’s). The most anxiety producing times however were the projects that involved migrating older code bases to newer platforms. I would have to go into full on forensic crime scene investigator mode on these codebases.

Understanding code that is not yours can make you feel as productive as staring at a wall. Some developers that can just look at code once and decipher it in minutes. That was not me however, so I inched my way through code one painful line at a time.