Ugly Code: Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder

Keynote spreker: Alex Papadimoulis (Engelstalig)

Abstract

It's said that without evil there can be no good and that without darkness, there can be no light. Is the same true of ugly and beautiful code? Maybe... but that's certainly not a question I'll be answering in this talk. Instead, we'll talk about ugly code, where it comes from, how to avoid it, and how to rid your codebase of it. And of course, I'll share some of my favorite anti-examples from The Daily WTF.

Biography

Residing in Berea, Ohio, Alex Papadimoulis (twitter) is partner at Inedo and helps drive the direction of Inedo's agile release automation suite (BuildMaster) and Inedo's .NET enterprise dependency manager (ProGet). In his spare time, he's the editor of The Daily WTF, a leading how-not to guide for developing software.

From Wikipedia

The Daily WTF (also called Worse Than Failure from February to December 2007) is a humorous blog dedicated to “Curious Perversions in Information Technology”. The blog, run by Alex Papadimoulis, “offers living examples of code that invites the exclamation ‘WTF!?’” ... and “recounts tales of disastrous development, from project management gone spectacularly bad to inexplicable coding choices.”

In addition to horror stories, The Daily WTF “serve[s] as [a] repositor[y] of knowledge and discussion forums for inquisitive web designers and developers” and has introduced several anti-patterns, including Softcoding, the Inner-Platform Effect, and IHBLRIA (Invented Here But Let's Reinvent It Anyway).