Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror has an excellent article this morning entitled “The First Rule of Programming: It’s Always Your Fault“. This is particularly hilarious to me since I have seen this in action many times… Hibernate seems to be a recurring target of this anti-pattern. I’ve seen engineers on multiple occasions swear that something is wrong with Hibernate or that there is a bug in Hibernate and then propose to rip out the persistence layer all together and replace it with some home-grown JDBC interface. Tempers flare for a day or so and then finally somebody reads the docs and figures out the quirk in our code that caused the problems.  Mr. Atwood is doling out sound advice here and this is a good article to keep on hand for the next time you hear one of your peers suggest writing your own, less buggy, persistence layer.

Jeff Vogel has an article on IBM’s developerWorks giving six tips to writing more comprehensible code. The examples given are in C++, but the tips are equally applicable to programming in any language.