I have been at my new job for a week now. It has been great. The people are friendly, the atmosphere is nice, the work is challenging. All in all I could happily do this for a few years and not feel the need to stretch myself further. The one thing that is bugging me is the custom CMS we use. It was built by the current developer and my predecessor and dont get me wrong its a fantastic system. It does everything we need it to do and it was built from the ground up based on the codeIgnitor framework. Once you get your head around it its also a nice easy system to develop with, everything is in a logical place (near enough) and its all good. The only problem is a problem which I’m sure has plagued developers since programs were written on punch cards. Comments and documentation. On my first day I was given a basic copy of the CMS, a design to follow and a quick talk through the system then told to get on with it. My gripe here isn’t the talk from my colleague because that was more useful than the comments and documentation that barely totalled a paragraph for each class.
If your going to develop a system it needs comments. Us developers aren’t always good at commenting code and I’m sure if we are all honest we can list a handful of programs that we didn’t comment or document because “It won’t matter just this once”. The trouble comes when it does matter. As a plea to all software developers out there, no matter what code you are writing, please comment your code. If you do it as you go it isn’t a huge chore, we all slip at times but it will save huge headaches in the future. I was thinking of building a CMS for Smush Ltd before I even applied for the job but this has spurred me on to get started planning, coding, testing and fixing. Oh and commenting if I think it might be needed.