Monday, October 10, 2011

I broke things, so now I will jiggle things randomly until they unbreak

I came across this great quote from Linus Torwalds (not even a quote, just more of a random thing he said):

This kind of "I broke things, so now I will jiggle things randomly until they unbreak" is not acceptable.

Subject: Re: Linux 2.6.39-rc3

I feel a bit sad because that's what I'm doing a lot recently - "Oh, the API fails when I try to get visible image in JPG format? Well, how about infrared in BMP format? Oh, the API fails when I ask for a string? Well, I can live with a byte array, I'll do the conversion myself".

That's a bad practice and I'm trying not to do that - my only excuse is the poor documentation supplied with third-party API's and SDK's.

by . Also posted on my website

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