Instead of WTF is this? — try How interesting!

I used to work with a lovely gentle senior engineer in a big old codebase. It was old and hard and we had to access it through a windows 7 virtual machine and use Internet Explorer 6 to access admin tools and it made people pretty angry and sad in equal measures.

Except my friend. Every time he found something crazy or bizarre in the codebase he’d smile and say “how interesting!”.

And then he’d go and try to figure it out because it was an interesting problem.

Now anytime something seems like awful indecipherable code or is just bizarre behaviour I try to go with “how interesting”, even if I’m on my own.

I try to imagine what caused this code to be written, what were the circumstances behind it so I can make sure that I’m fully understanding what’s happening and not quickly dismissing something as bad because I don’t understand it at first glance.

Anyway, maybe give it a go. Instead of What The Fuck try a How interesting. it might make you a happier developer.