Developers! We are the modern day artists, the masters of the keyboard and the sculptors of algorithms and ideas. We turn obscure thought and imagination into real life creations, capable of doing things previously not done (well, at least not in the same form). As such, we are individuals and unique – each one of us in our own way. Whether we develop a mobile app or a web application, our unique style, way of thought, organization and coding style will be reflected into our creation – we can’t help it, this is who we are.
About 2 years ago I’ve done a project for a start-up company in Israel, where I developed a full blown switching environment for them. I worked on that project for around 9 months and how shall I put it, my name was all over the place. Normally, when I take a piece of code from the OpenSource/PublicDomain, I will document where it came from within the code – then I will add a simple remark next to my modifications.
So, the other day I met one of the new developers working on the project – who didn’t know I was the original developer. And he told me about some issue that he was having with his project – so, in a very natural way, I pointed out to him that the original code wasn’t meant to work like that, specifically, he should into a specific function to resolve the issue and add some additional code to make it work as he wanted. The guy was shocked – “What the hell? are you psychic or something? how can you know that?” – I replied – “Well, I wrote the damn code, I should know”, which followed by me showing him the original source code on my computer. The guy said: “Yes, that is the source code, but all the remarks of the original source code are gone”. Seems that following my departure from the project, someone went into great length in order to remove the various comments I’ve put into the code, to make its origins as unclear as possible.
So, on one hand, I truly understood it – after all, the guy running the show doesn’t want the new people to call up the previous developers and exposing new stuff to them – even if by mistake. On the other hand – Dude, are you really that lame? are you really the afraid that your team will know who wrote the original code?. Source code is a living organism, it is an unique as the person who wrote it and will evolve and change as more people write more code. The Asterisk project still contains remarks that Mark Spencer put back in 2002 – and they are no longer relevant to the existing code, but only to an obscure part of the original code – but it’s still there.
So, to sum up, I never remove remarks that other people wrote from my code – it’s rude, it’s bad practice and worst of all – it’s ugly and disrespectful. Developer will join and leave a project, show your minimal level of respect by respecting their code and their remarks, leave them where they are – removing them is just like performing an act of murder.