Hatefuck hacking

4 May 2011
These days, almost all of my software is written out of anger. I used to program for fun, and then for convenience. Now, it's motivated almost exclusively by rage.
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29 Responses to Hatefuck hacking

  1. Sean says:
    4 May 2011 at 1:00 pm

    And is the code better or worse for it?

  2. Mike Hoye says:
    4 May 2011 at 1:09 pm

    I hear that. Some of my greatest work has gone into making things work the way they should have in the goddamn first place.

  3. peterix says:
    4 May 2011 at 1:31 pm

    Welcome to the world of hate driven development.

  4. Sean D. Sollé says:
    4 May 2011 at 1:41 pm

    Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to softwaring.

  5. fantasygoat says:
    4 May 2011 at 1:53 pm

    Sounds like Agile.

  6. pavel_lishin says:
    4 May 2011 at 1:58 pm

    It also seems like the angrier you get, the closer your posts come to fitting into a tweet.

    Soon, your posts will simply consist of "Hate AppleScript".

  7. aarjona says:
    4 May 2011 at 2:59 pm

    I like that the short link for this post is http://jwz.org/b/ygay

  8. Ian Young says:
    4 May 2011 at 4:05 pm

    I just wish more of the code you wrote also was a mailreader. It's just not the same these days.

  9. Noah says:
    4 May 2011 at 4:42 pm

    Current music: Rage Against the Machine

  10. Tim says:
    4 May 2011 at 4:50 pm

    Are you sure? I've looked at some of your code over the years and I can feel the hate through the monitor. Admittedly, most of this was X11 stuff...

  11. zuvembi says:
    5 May 2011 at 12:28 am

    I've generated a lot of software out of spite in the last year or two.

    Continuous Integration Server - "No, fuck you! You broke the build!"

    Staging repository / web-app - "Jesus christ! That shell script only has two parameters. How do you put your pants on in the morning?"

    pre-commit checks - "Fuck me. You can't even do svn switch right, what is your major malfuction? And I fucking dare you to put 'initial import' again (for the 72nd time)."

    Source control quick search webapp - "God damn it! If you tell me it's a merge problem one more time without at least looking at the code change first, I'm going to go over there and defenestrate you."

    Continuous Review software - "You didn't review any of that code you lying scrote weasel. Time for five minutes with a live octopus down the pants!"

    Database munging to actually make our bug database work in a browser - "I fucking hate you so so so much Kwality Center. I hope someone got primo lap dances and scotch to buy this piece of shit."

  12. serge says:
    5 May 2011 at 5:17 am

    The more I live, the more I hate humans and like well-designed programs.

    Now playing : Hate Eternal - The Plague of Humanity

  13. Matthew phillips says:
    5 May 2011 at 7:19 am

    Right on. Testy-driven programming.

  14. Jef Poskanzer says:
    5 May 2011 at 9:18 am

    There's a Bruce Sterling novel in which two groups of hackers end up going to war over differing network protocols.

  15. Marcos Dione says:
    5 May 2011 at 3:54 pm

    My development is not exactly hate-driven, but hate is, sometimes, definitely in the process. Of course it all begins with some kind of bug that you spend hours tracking, figuring out, staring at, bitching about, and, if you're lucky, fixing and having a venting fit, which may include some, but not necessarily all, of: loud voice cursing, tearing of garments and object trowing to nowhere in particular and/or the author of the bug.

  16. John Morton says:
    5 May 2011 at 8:10 pm

    From The Making of: Repton:

    The game: Repton, the author: a now reflective Tim Tyler. Yet two years afterwards, before he’d even finished his A-levels, Tyler had sold the franchise to the name of his lizard and confessed that he was through with programming, calling it “too inhumane to make a career of”.

  17. sneak says:
    6 May 2011 at 3:26 am

    How else could we have ended up with UNIX?

  18. Zingus J. Rinkle says:
    6 May 2011 at 8:01 am

    Is it possible to write software out of something different than anger?

    out of what?