Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Playing Tetris while coding?

As many of us, I had to work on code that was created by someone else. In my case, it was even code wrote by multiple persons. My mission was to refactor and improve performance.
I found it interesting to compare that task to playing Tetris. First of all, reading thru the code was literally like a puzzle. The next part of the game, refactoring, reminded me a lot when you start a Tetris game with a screen already filled at 75% and you slowly start to “fix” the underlying structure to remove holes.
In the end, I had to stop playing Tetris on that one and completely rewrote the code. Not that I don’t like mind games but time is money and it was definitely faster to rewrite than try to “fix”.