This month’s revolving blog party is being hosted by the creator himself, Adam Machanic (blog|twitter). This month’s topic chosen by Adam is about the forgettable practices/habits of the past that can be avoided. This is a topic on which I can write long rants about… But I shall limit myself to writing about three areas where I have managed to chuck some bad habits and thereby reduced the amount of redundant time that I needed to spend due to these avoidable habits!

Your code needs some English!

One of the practices to be avoided pertaining to T-SQL coding was brought out in unison by the community members during last month’s T-SQL Tuesday was about adding relevant comments to your code. I shall take this a notch higher and talk about adding comments for two reasons:

a. Remember why a change/modification was made to the code
b. So that someone supporting your code understands the logic behind what you have written

More often than not it’s a convenience and sometimes sheer laziness which has prevented. This happens especially during crisis situations where a quick change to the code resolves the situation but you forgot to mention in the file why and when the change was made. This little indiscretion which I have been a victim as well as a perpetrator of has cost me a lot of precious time in the past. So, don’t be lazy… Add a few English lines to your code to help the person supporting it!

Simplicity in source control can prevent hair loss

Not maintaining any form of version control for your source code is quite common when it is an individual managing the entire project or the tool development. But I still believe that sometimes simple forms of source control can save you a lot of painful hours and wishing that you had one pill that Bradley Copper had in Limitless. You don’t need to have a version control software or VSTS setup to manage your code. You could use simple logic like taking a backup of your code or naming your files v1, v1.2 and so on and so forth before making a huge change to your application code that cannot be handled by the way of comments without writing a small essay. This is also a form of laziness which in the past has cost me hours of coding time. So be smart and maintain your code in such a way that you can revert your code back to a previous version in a matter of minutes!!

Documentation is an important key to saving time

I am sure all of you are well aware that documentation is necessary but it can be mundane at times. The entire reason I setup this blog was to document those unique quirks about SQL Server and those unique solutions that I arrived at by looking at disparate pieces of information. I must admit that I do not have photographic memory and I need to have reference to documentation which is available with the helps of a keywords search. I use the search on my blog to find my old posts!! So if I didn’t document a unique solution, I would end up spending the same X amount of hours working on the same issue the next time I encounter it. The value of documentation is that it saves time!

A wise man/woman learns from his/her mistakes. But a wiser man/woman learns from other people’s mistakes.