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Top 5 Ways to Make a Developer Your Enemy

Developers are known to be some of the most finicky employees you will encounter in the workplace. However, this is a list of things that will annoy or infuriate developers and non-developers alike.

1. Have the IT Manager send an email to all staff saying that all computers will have a keylogger installed. – This one is wrong on so many levels, the least of which is that it shows how little faith the company has in its employees and breeds mistrust of authority.
2. As a Manager or Team Lead, take ideas and suggestions from meetings with your team, and pass them off to upper management as your own. – This just reeks of someone that is only in it to gain more and more power.
3. As a Manager, don’t take the heat when things go wrong and blame the lowest-level employee instead. – I’ve seen senior management that is supposed to keep track of projects, ignore the project, and when it is the due date, blame those doing actual work on the project, throwing them under the bus.
4. As a new employee, on your second day of work, tell anyone that will listen or is within earshot that you are able to rewrite the entire codebase in three short months. Bear in mind, this codebase is over 7 years old and has a team of more than 20 developers working on it, but of course the newbie can rewrite the entire thing in no time flat.
5. As Management, when a developer hands in his/her resignation, schedule a meeting to try to first place a guilt trip on said employee to convince them to stay. If that doesn’t seem to work, then threaten to give the employee negative referrals if they don’t rescind the resignation and continue working for the company. Keep in mind that this occurred in a right to work state, meaning that there is no agreement in place that the employer would not wait a day or week or month and fire the employee without cause, just out of spite for wanting to work elsewhere.

These are just some of the things that will anger a software developer, so, be aware to avoid these if it matters at all to you.

Avoid SiteCatalyst's useForcedLinkTracking and target="_blank"

All sites rely upon some third party analytics software to track at the very least the number of visitors to a site. Many sites use Google Analytics, which provide much more information that just the number of visitors. Another option that some of the bigger sites use is Adobe Analytics, aka SiteCatalyst to enable more custom tracking options that are not evident through the Google Analytics interface.

One feature of SiteCatalyst is that it allows you to set an option useForcedLinkTracking that will track every link on your site for clicks whether or not you have setup custom tracking for the links or not. Effectively what the code does is create a JavaScript event handler to intercept all click events on the <a href="http://url.com">Link</a> hyperlinks. Once they are intercepted, SiteCatalyst sends its tracking information to its servers and then procedes to attempt to make sure that the link functions properly. Unfortunately, in some versions of the SiteCatalyst code, it attempts to create a synthetic click event that works in many cases. However, if you are using Safari with the popup blocker turned on, and a target="_blank" in the hyperlink, then it will trigger the popup blocker, which simply ignores the click, and the user sees nothing happen at all. In order to fix it, hopefully the latest version of the SiteCatalyst code will handle it, turn off useForcedLinkTracking, or, as the very last resort, convert the <a /> links to another type of element and use JavaScript to open the new window manually when listening for the click event on the new element. It seems this works all the time, but it will prevent SiteCatalyst from tracking those clicks.

The Easiest Way to Create A Solution That Works

The easiest way to create a solution that works…is to do it right the first time. Yes, this is a bit of a cop-out, but it turns out to be an important factor to keep in mind when you are tempted to come up with a quick and dirty solution for a problem that does not follow established best practices and is likely to have code quality issues later.

I have run across many sections of code that I or other developers have written in the past that we thought were “good enough” at the time it was written, yet, I was revisiting the code because we discovered a bug in it. Many times, this code had an issue that would have been trivial to fix at the time it was written, if it were only found. It seems that as a developer, we tend to find the least sufficient solution that will solve the immediate problem we are experiencing instead of finding an optimal solution that will be easily maintained months and years after it was written.