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It has been a little while, hasn’t it? I hope you have been finding the lessons and gifts in each day. Much of my time lately is going toward a longer term engagement with a company (I’m currently helping a team wrangle a couple decades of legacy code, and as you might imagine, the biggest problems are on the human side, not the technical side!). Compassion comes in very handy in dealing with legacy code, let me tell you. I often find myself chanting the Prime Directive in my head, like a mantra: “Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.” [source]
I’ll admit it’s harder to be understanding when trying to decipher a critical error message someone wrote 10 years ago that just says, “Meow,” but the Prime Directive applies to us, too: we’re doing our best to stay patient and compassionate. 😅 Before you add an obscure cultural reference or quirky inside joke to code, though, I implore you to think of the poor developer who may be wading through your code a decade (or a few months) later. Pausing to consider the humans who may read your code in the future leads to more compassionate code. (And remember, that future person may be you!)
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