The bane of a programmer’s life

One of the bane’s of my life being a programmer is trying to explain to people why things take as long as they do.

Sometimes you can spend hours with nothing to show apart from managing to add 300 lines to the project. Mostly just checking that all the information that a user will enter won’t cause anything to break, get deleted or allow the user to get to the main database.

The below cartoon from the great XKCD website sums up the major problem in a simple[ish] way.

Exploits of a mom. Testing programmers workIt doesn’t sound hard to do.  It isn’t.  On the other hand, if you have a load of inputs from the user, the amount of checking can get a bit exponential and frustrating even if you throw the checking into functions.

I’m sure that there is a 90% checking to 10% other rule of programming.  Be that a simple check to see if a box has been ticked to a validation routine to see if a credit card’s number is in the correct format so it can be sent to get authorised.