Just got a letter from CMU rejecting my PhD application. Now Harvard are the only people who have yet to reject me. :-)

Overengineer (verb): The process of attempting to come up with a solution which suffers from an excessively high level of not being half-assed.

I’ve discovered and started using an amusing new site recently. Code Snippets. It basically lets you share snippets of code you’ve written (as the name might suggest). So far I’ve only got one snippet, but I expect there will be more soon – I often write amusing utility classes, and this looks like a good place to share them.

I’ve grown to really hate the coding standards at work, in a few key regards. Not coding standards in general, but ours just seem designed to make more work for us.

Most of them really are more work, but some of them have a useful purpose even so (some of them don’t. I’m really sick of preceding field names with m). I’ve been writing a bunch of code this weekend for a toy project of mine; previously I’d more or less stuck to our coding standards with a few minor omissions. In particular I was using the same layout at work. But, because of the way I’m increasingly coding, this was resulting in obscene amounts of whitespace. So, I decided to change it a bit and see where it took me. One thing led to another, and with the new layout I was increasingly inclined to follow my new approach.

Without further ado, here’s a snippet of some sample code.

So, in summary, why do we have these coding standards? It’s to protect you from people like me. :-)