Dirty Coding Tricks to Deliver Project on Time

Question

Just read a good article about dirty coding hacks used by game developers to get a game out the door:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4111/dirty_coding_tricks.php

Has anyone here had to pull a quick and dirty trick to save a project?

Answer 1

I have worked on a project where dirty tricks were the main driving principle of the development. Needlees to say, after some time these tricks have started to conflict with each other. In one analytics component, we had to implement the other very dirty trick - to hide away those calculated values which due to the conflicting tricks were not calculated properly. Afterwards, the second level tricks started to conflict and we had to create tricks to deal with those. Ever since, even the mentioning of this component makes me feel horror that I may have to work on it again.

Answer 2

Has anyone not? Making software professionally is always a tradeoff between writing that perfect code, and making the software available to the users. Sometimes, a hack or "dirty trick" happens to be the tool you need to achieve the latter.

Answer 3

People who claim to never ever use dirty tricks either:

• don't get the concept of what a dirty trick is
• don't work in the real world
• they write wonderful code, but don't get their stuff done on time

I've worked with programmers who always want to do stuff "the Right Way" often enough to know that they just don't deliver.

It's usually the fresh-out-of-university guys that don't have enough experience to know that writing software in the real world is always about making compromises and being pragmatic.

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Imagine this: Your manager comes running in together with the CEO, shouting: "Whoa, client xx is really upset, and threatens to cancel all their contracts with us. We need a feature x and y TODAY, or we're doomed!".

Believe me, that is not the time say that you need 3 weeks because you need to design a nice and clean OO framework with proper documentation. It's the time to open your box of tricks to fucking get the job done.