Monday, August 29, 2005 - Mon, 29 Aug 2005

I’ve adopted an interesting approach for going through my 60 or so test GEDCOM files. I’m starting with the smallest (in bytes) and working through towards the largest. That way any things that don’t quite work right will have the smallest possible GEDCOM to work with and it should be easier to find and fix the problems. So far working through my smallest files, I’ve found 13 minor things I’ve fixed (less than 5 minutes each) and 2 more challenging things (about 15 minutes each to fix).

Here’s a very interesting post about Why Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb.

I’ve always had a related philosophy. Good Programmers make lots of mistakes: (1) If you are afraid of making mistakes, you’ll never attempt anything. (2) If you don’t make mistakes, you’ll never spend the time finding out why you made them and you won’t learn anything. Conclusion: He who makes no mistakes doesn’t do anything and knows nothing.