Which reminds me of a question I have been asking myself lately. What do you do with your portfolio of "hacky" code?
For instance, recently I wanted to experiment porting an open source application to iOS, to give the old iPhone 3G I had just lying around a new life. There were certain parts of the existing codebase that weren't well structured to meet the requirements of the iOS APIs I had to fit in, but I managed to squeeze in the changes without any major restructuring.
It is code I am not proud of, code I would never write in a professional setting, but it was the perfect direction for my requirements and constraints. For that, I am really happy with the result.
Ultimately, I determined that the 3G just didn't have enough processing power to meet the expectations I had, so I don't have any interest in taking the project further or cleaning up the mess I made. However, even in the state it is in, it is code that is most likely useful to others. But at the same time I don't feel it reflects well on my abilities.
i leave it on my github. i link the source for my shitty blog from my resume with a note: "solo author. freetime experimental project. my blog is hosted here. don't look too hard at this code, it sucks."
Which reminds me of a question I have been asking myself lately. What do you do with your portfolio of "hacky" code?
For instance, recently I wanted to experiment porting an open source application to iOS, to give the old iPhone 3G I had just lying around a new life. There were certain parts of the existing codebase that weren't well structured to meet the requirements of the iOS APIs I had to fit in, but I managed to squeeze in the changes without any major restructuring.
It is code I am not proud of, code I would never write in a professional setting, but it was the perfect direction for my requirements and constraints. For that, I am really happy with the result.
Ultimately, I determined that the 3G just didn't have enough processing power to meet the expectations I had, so I don't have any interest in taking the project further or cleaning up the mess I made. However, even in the state it is in, it is code that is most likely useful to others. But at the same time I don't feel it reflects well on my abilities.