Leaf Blowers

Have you ever seen those guys who cut grass that use a leaf blower?

As I was taking my usual walk the other day, one of them was blowing leaves and grass clippings across the sidewalk into someone's flowerbed - out of sight, out of mind.

That kind of behavior really gets to me. And it's not just landscapers that exhibit this lack of judgment.

I am seeing this kind of behavior with software engineering and application development professionals - especially as the complexity of coding increases.

Here's what I mean.

Software code can be generally thought of as either internal or external with respect to other aspects of a system, specifically if your company is a software vendor. The external code is the code that the source is available and the internal code is the code that the source is private.

What I've noticed is that internal code, if you decompile it, oftentimes looks like the flowerbed where the leaves and grass clippings were blown. It seems that some software engineering professionals allow their code to get cluttered with bad or ill-designed code that has been swept under the mat of abstraction and encapsulation (to use object oriented terms), and left there - out of sight, out of mind.

I urge software professionals and vendors to clean house. Your code needs some spring cleaning. Dust out the cobwebs and sweep under the mats. And then, put in place some best practices (continuous integration with unit tests would be a good start) that will help keep the leaves out of your flowerbed.

Just promise me one thing... Don't be a leaf blower.