Like it or not, we as programmers sometimes fail miserably. We write buggy code, or ugly code that works to keep deadlines. We learn about new techniques, or a new, better version of the language/framework is released but we don’t update old code bases.
Do you have such code publicly online? Or do you remove it as soon as you realise? Or you don’t even upload code that is far from being a masterpiece? Or you are such a code warrior you immediately fix such problems?
If I am writing a tutorial or a sample project for others to read and understand, I always upload code that I am proud of. If it's an internal experiment or side project for fun I try to give my best, but occasionally leave bugs or unoptimised code. But do I come back and improve things? It depends on whether I want to move ahead with the project. If yes, I redo the project properly.
I always do. Public repos are like USB drives to me. lol
At the time, I thought this code was beautiful: github.com/sunnysingh/database/blob/master/databa…
I'm super ashamed of it now, of course. Jeez, why did I hate whitespace so much? But even though that was 5 years ago, I'm still ashamed of code that I wrote 1 year ago. We all improve over time, and I think that's a good reason to actually keep that old code public. The same way that you can search basic StackOverflow questions from now well-known developers.
Some people have code in _private_ repositories that they have no business signing LOL.
In all seriousness though, I think newbies are the only people who assume that everything on GitHub is a reflection of your actual coding ability. It simply isn't; especially in cases where the developer obvious deserted their GitHub and has random crap up from years ago.
Madhankumar
JavaScript developer | Scotch Author | Keyboard guy
I used to update all my fun and side projects in the Github as public repo. Even if it has any ugly code or clean code, I used to ship it.
Following are the reasons:
Personally I believe that only guys who have written bad code can write clean code.
So I don't worry about that will keep shipping my code.