Stuff that has been bothering me

I've been called a whiner. It is true, and I'd like to apologize right now. I'm not sorry I'm a whiner, but I am sorry that my vocal nature isn't positive more often than it's negative.

My company is, apparently, looking for web-developers. I think we need software developers regardless of web experience. Most web developers have bad habits that are hard to break. I don't think we should be in the business of programming web pages. We should be programming tools for building web pages. We should be hiring web-designers who can be trained to use the tools that our software team develops and our software team should be watching and listening to the needs of our web-designers.

When I see how fast we turn projects around, I'm not unhappy but, I'm not satisfied. When I see the code that we produce I think, "This isn't so great. Man, we could do so much better". This code comes mostly from juniors but also from our seniors (this includes myself). Most of our code is most often seen only by the author until it needs to be fixed or reused.

When I make an implementation choice and I ask peers for feedback I sometimes get "That sounds good, lets do that". Other times I hear "Well, why don't you do it this way..." and we have a discussion (usually very productive). The prior is not due to my ability to produce flawless design, but more usually due to the peer's overloading or lack of investment in the details of that particular project. The later is something that should happen to every implementation decision made by every coder.

I know I'm not the greatest tester (most developers are terrible testers) but I get frustrated when fixing the most basic of bugs that weren't found until weeks or months after the fact. I get especially frustrated when they are bugs in my own code and more so again when it was my own testing that didn't catch it.

I really do think we have the potential to be the best at what we do. All we need is to just do it, and do it right!