A matter of common sense

I have been seeing more and more sloppy programming everyday and it is starting to get to me. I guess this is one of those software engineering traits coming out in me. I would like to think that quality control is on the top of people’s minds, but at the same time I can see how it might slip through the cracks. Obviously left to their own devices, programmers are most interested in getting the job done and not in learning and doing it properly. Obviously web programming is what I refer to with most of my comments as that is what I am most familiar with. You can be an excellent programmer but that won’t necessarily make you a good web developer. And knowing php or asp really well doesn’t make you one either. Experience and a little bit of common sense go a long way. You can’t just start with experience I realize, but it shouldn’t take you very long. This rant could go off in a lot of different directions and I don’t think that I really want to do that. I’m liable to offend a few people. I think that at some point in the next couple weeks I will write up an article on how to properly plan and develop small applications for the web. I think that many people will learn a fair bit from it, I’m sure that I will. Until then remember - when you pull something out of a database and you know/desire that there will only be one record, use an if () statement, not a while () loop!