This does happen a lot, but have you ever had the opposite happen? Where you go into some of your older code, and not only is it nice to read, but you had anticipated that you'd have to make this change later, and so the design makes the change easy?

That's happened to me a few times and all I can say is that it takes days for my self-satisfaction to wane.

Who the fuck wrote this!?

''Written by Sanctus Two/Months/Ago''

As soon as I stopped trying to write textbook OOP stuff, this stopped occurring to me. That was years ago.

I'm not saying I write perfect code, no. But when I read bad stuff I wrote, I can understand it and think of ideas about how to improve it if that becomes necessary.

On top of writing more functional-style code, the way I achieved this was:

• Absolutely no inheritance whatsoever. Composition + interfaces work wonders for what I do.
• Minimal mutable state. This pays dividends when debugging.
• Ditto for type-system-encoded nullability markers (ie. ? in C#, std::optional in C++...)
• I avoid writing code just-in-case something happens. If I haven't run it manually or via unit tests, it goes to the garbage bin (not an absolute, just a guiding principle). There's a chance that code isn't even correct to begin with and you'll have to throw it away should you ever need it.
• Low indirection. I don't want to jump through 10 functions to see what something is doing, and nobody else does either.

Junior ass meme

I really don't understand this meme. As a longtime professional programmer I regularly go back and review code I wrote last month, last year and last decade; in order to find things I did wrong and learn from things I did right. Sometimes I do get the revelation of "oh, how much I've learned since then", but that's most often very far in the past and seldomly that I'd be ashamed of writing the same code again now, mostly just a welcome realization that I've been able to learn and improve since then.

I am usually quite pleased with my old code. It ain't perfect, but it's doing well for itself. Sometimes there is silly stuff I need to fix, but then I just laugh at myself.

I looked at code I wrote about a year ago today. Yeah, there are things I would've done differently now, but I had no trouble following it. Some of the choices I made were company standards at the time as well which, thankfully, have improved.

I like that this meme implies women and enbies write immaculate code and never regret what they've written before 😎

2 months.

I've been writing the same software since 2003.

Someone left some real crap in there.

Eh. I just jumped back into a project and felt kinda like a fish getting back into water.

Arrrggghhhh! It's hideous! Make it go away!

Its a great to see how much i've improved in 2 years :)

Remembering the code i used to write and how i do it now

*his own two months old code

Depending on the state of sleep deprivation and flow state, even waking up to the previous nights code is an out of body experience of shock and awe. Either I am surprised at the level of complexity and elegance with the rabbit hole that I went down or it’s a fragmented mess of FIXME placeholders that don’t communicate the brilliant ideas and plans from past me.

That's why I let my code rest for 2 months before committing.

Also the face almost everyone makes when they open up that tupperware that's been in the very back of the fridge for the same amount of time as your code.

See, this is why vibe coding is awesome. You’ll never have to look at the code ever again!

TWO MONTHS!?!?

I don't even know what I did last week!

When I git blame after finding the production issue and see the committer is me

I barely remember anything I made from 2 months ago lol

But… document your code.

Hahahaha for who?!?

Uh… for future you!

Me to future me: lol no

You mean… yesterday’s code.