You're going to need larger denominations...

So you are now officially encouraging people to write all their bad code in as few and long lines as possible, to get cheaper offsets ;)

I don't know why it is that some developers consistently denigrate their code. I don't know why this must be. I have worked as an electrician, and have had to review my own wiring and soldering and my own installations, and although there might be a thing or two here are there that could be tweaked, I was almost always proud of my work. As an engineer the degree of difficulty shot way up from being a tweak (Navy-speak for an electronics technician), but I never recall looking back and just loathing my prior work. And now, as an experienced developer, I can look at earlier samples of my work without cringing. Yes, I have polished my technique further since then, but the logic is not really going to change much. The implementation? Eh. Why waste time beating yourself up over your code? It is pointless to me. This is a progression. My code gets better and better. The corrolary is that it looks worse and worse the further back I go. But this is not a bad thing. Just like the circuit boards people designed in the 60s look quite quaint and inefficient compared to what we can design today, they still got the job done and did the job reliably.

Also, I am a musician who was written original music for years. I never rip my old stuff, even if my more mature ears are constantly noticing things that might have been expressed differently. But that's why they invented the remix, baby.

I would definitely consider donating to FOSS projects (& I have actually donated in the past), but not on the basis of my own code quality. What if I didn't know my code was bad? Should I just buy enough credits for every single line in the project? Who would pay, me or my employer?

What about people that write bad code using jQuery, PostgreSQL and ASF ?

I see supposedly smart people missing the point and focusing on the joke about bad code instead.

"The proceeds from the sale of Bad Code Offsets are donated to various worthy Open Source initiatives..."

This implies that some portion of the amount donated is going elsewhere besides the open source projects - perhaps to cover your costs, or perhaps to pay someone a salary.

What are your costs in running this website? How much of the donations are going to some place that isn't one of the open source projects (such as Jeff Atwood LLC)?

Wow, publicly calling out bad code (in that htmLawed example). I would hate to be Santosh Patnaik right now.

"How much of the donations are going to some place that isn't one of the open source projects"

+1 I would very much like to see the breakdown for this or wouldn't consider donating any money.

That's almost like a religious teaching "If you sin, take god's name x number of times and your sins are washed away".

"For every ten thousand lines of mind-bendingly bad code produced, we hope to subsidize a thousand lines of quality open source code."

Does that mean for every $10k you get from code offsets only $1k goes towards open source?

Please tell me that is not so, otherwise you are basically clearing peoples bad code guilt in exchanges for your own personal profit!

a hef="http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-did-it-for-the-lulz"

Did you hef for the lulz? :O

Nice riff on the whole "carbon credits" BS as well :-)

@Jon C: I'm pretty sure the 1:10 metric means that they consider good code to cost a lot more to produce than bad code :)

Your ambition is noble, but your website screams "1997". For your own credibility - get a professional designer.

Re: Matt B

Or maybe it's a way to re-kindle thedailyWTF's spluttering fire. I used to read it alot... Now I check it about once every month and its filled with classic (AKA: old) posts and/or total crap.

This is a sure fire way that they can get others "bad" code for free... make personal gain from advertisement's and now sales whilst keeping the WTF train rolling.

Boo

I meant of course the Code Offset website, Jeff's site screams "minimalistic stylishness" ;)

I enjoy the "emission" of bad code.

Least I could do ?

http://leasticoulddo.com/

Yeah, I'll get right on that... Right after I finish buying these indulgences for Purgatory.

Abolsutely ridiculous.

Long time reader, first time poster...

Oh please... you have become too much like Joel... thinking that every software developer out there is making a fortune and can waste their money on this crap.

I must say I wasn't impressed until I saw the THE JON SKEET is a chair member of the organizations board. You should of mentioned that earlier!

Thats all the advertisement you need !

Jeff,

I know you're not really from the business world, but it is where most programmers reside. In listing the possibilities to overcome bad code I think you are missing one essential item that is as important as the skill and dedication of a programmer.

I'm talking about resources. For example, a project with so much time pressure that developers are forced to cut corners. Or, a business hiring developers so junior/cheap that it is impossible to get any quality. Or, a business who saves on proper hardware and software, frustrating the productivity of the developer.

Stupid business. Yes. But it's business, and it's how it works for a lot of us. My point: poor code quality cannot be directly related to poor developers, that would be a gross simplification of the truth.

Brilliant! I'm still laughing. I don't know about jQuery or Postgres but Apache projects aren't necessarily leading the charge against bad code. In fact, I've seen significant quantities of pollution bellowing from the smoke stacks over there on occasion.

What we need a is foundation that works on existing open source projects with no other purpose than to improve bad code.

And after that we need a new development methodology with a cool name and a requirement incorporate code offset billing into code reviews. Every time "WTF" is heard in a code review, the developer gets charged an offset credit! The developer still needs to fix the bad code from the review, the offset is an acknowledgment of the bad code he or she will be pumping into the universe that won't be reviewed.

Just like cashiers who come up short, your bad code offsets get deducted from your paycheck.

In my view they should be tax deductible. This gets better and better!

This is hilarious...it's like you cross-bred Indulgences with Carbon offsets. And in truth, the absolute LEAST you could do, is nothing. Which almost everyone will do. But I'm hooked, I'll buy a few as gifts for my colleagues. Fun idea.

Basically you want to create incentives for all the lousy programmers to code-golf their bugs into the smallest number of lines possible. Won't the lousy programmers spend all their time reducing offset costs rather than producing more . . .

Hmm . . .

I may be over analyzing this (what, me?) but I see a major inconsistency here with the same concept of carbon offsets.

People who buy carbon offsets usually do so because they are either unwilling or unable to reduce their carbon emissions any further through direct means. (So far so good). But the reason the carbon offset concept works is that most times is that operating in a way which ememits extra CO2 is usually CHEAPER. Thus, the extra money can be payed to help motivate/restrict others from doing the same.

The bad code parallel doesn't hold up as far as I can see. This is because, as we all know, writing bad code is MORE EXPENSIVE. If you write lots of bad code, you're going to need that extra money down the road to fix or just maintain your own mess, which you might otherwise send to a worthy cause such as bad code offsets.

Of course I might be missing the point entirely and should just see this as a clever wait to spin a fundraising effort for worthy open source projects. :-)

The more I think about this the more I am convinced that donating the money to OS projects is the wrong way to go. Instead the money should go to paying bad developers to stop writing code.

As in, "Here's your $300 in code credits, Jeff, go home and don't write any code at all today."

do they ship to italy?

So, how many offsets are required to cover Duct Tape?

You've got the trade part down, but how are you going to put a cap on bad code? Obviously a bad code tax would be a more efficient and market-driven approach to solving the problem. Maybe the Business Software Alliance could help with enforcement.

I saw this on worsethanfailure.com yesterday and immediately sent to my boss in hopes getting a bunch of offsets. So far doesn't seem likely... Great idea however.

Unlike carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere, bad lines of code are not equivalent. I don't particularly care if the implementation of some function has six lines of funny business. But if the method signature is horrendous, that's a big problem.

Or are you suggesting that the person responsible for the method signature be charged for all the bad code that results from its use? How much does Bell Labs owe for bugs caused by strcpy?

Maybe I'm just a dunce, but I don't understand this at all.

You're assuming that

A) I write bad code and know about it
B) I can quantify how many lines of bad code I write
c) I'll choose not to fix those lines, and instead donate money to your open source project.

If I notice that I have 1,10, 100 or even 1000 lines of bad code, wouldn't I fix them? Isn't that my job? I can't imagine telling my boss that my code sucks, but don't worry, I donated 100 bucks to an open source project.

In the parlance of offsets, why don't we take the money we'd spend planting trees and just figure out how to produce cheap clean power?

This appeared on The Daily WTF yesterday.

"It is, quite literally, the least you could do."

No, lierally the least I could do is nothing. Which seems about right.

"We foresee a time when bad coding practices and their rotten fruits have been eliminated from this earth and its server farms thereby heralding a new age of software brilliance and efficacy."

Uhmm, ok. If that makes you happy, I guess.

When you take away the comical facade of the offsets, you basically just have a marketing campaign to donate money to a foundation / brotherhood / gaggle of programmers, most of whom dont *need* the money.

Just imagine if every dollar spent on "bad code offsets" went to an actual good cause, like combating poverty in our inner cities, or helping to find a cure to diseases such as Parkinsons, or providing assistance to adults and children born with disabilities that make the standard of living we take for granted difficult for them to achieve Or even if you feel these are too "lefty" for you, support a religious organization doing charitable works.

oh god, people have very non-existing senses of humour

If you've money to fritter on stuff like this, please consider the alternative of donating it to one of the many worthy charities out there.

bad code < starving humans

Computers are the source of many problems in the world, just take the financial meltdown as an example... All of their hedge fund bets which were made using computer modeles; failed.

Of course it was based on bad real estate deals but who cares? We have our nice little probability equations modeled into our calcualtion as to when and not when to bet...

Give me a break, is it bad code or bad ideas?

Nobody is saying you should spend all your disposable income supporting open source projects. If you would rather support a charity or other "good causes" nobody is stopping you. In fact, do it; there are lots of good organizations that could use the help. But, I don't think most people would have a problem with donating a few dollars to a software project that has helped you and saved you time and money.

I've donated to a few OSS projects before, but that doesn't mean I can't support other good causes too.

Unbelievably remedial...

But on a side note, the quality of applications has suffered in part due to the complexity and instability of the tools.

"Computers are the source of many problems in the world, just take the financial meltdown as an example... All of their hedge fund bets which were made using computer modeles; failed."

Please don't spread this misinformation, the meltdown was due to widely known intrinsic flaws of capitalism.

nm it was sarcasm, disregard above

But what about the fact that jQuery itself is bad code? Infinite loop!

For those of you on a tight budget, that's ok--you can still do your part. Stop writing bad code!

;-)

Umm, I would be mildly surprised if any money really changes hands here (though there is no underestimating the ....)

What is really scary is that this system has already been deployed for years on commercial projects, with billions of dollars of everyone's real money in the pot. It's called Quality Credits, a.k.a. QC. Pretend to save money by faster coding, and patch it up afterwards with extra software testing and fixing.

It might be American funny. It might even be German funny. But it's not really funny.

(Pause while you refresh your notion of "funny" by watching a sitcom. I recommend anything by the BBC post 2001 or so.)

It's not Yiddish funny (which I think is crucial) and it's not Pirahã/Hi'aiti'ihi' funny. One, two, where did we start from again?

More importantly, it's irrelevant. You swap carbon emission permits as a fiat currency (true: it's broken). You don't swap broken code. You don't swap broken code paradigms (insert language or methodology here). You don't swap idiot co-workers, and even more importantly, you have no way of swapping the 80% of idiots who coded before you.

None whatsoever. I'd pay big bucks for that.

Like they say in Chicago, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"

Two words: Impedance Mismatch.

Now, if you can figure out how to trade on that ... then you've got a winner.

"When you take away the comical facade of the offsets, you basically just have a marketing campaign to donate money to a foundation / brotherhood / gaggle of programmers..."

Someone else noticed too.

This money would probably be much more appreciated by smaller developers/development teams.

Sure, Jeff, you first. Do you need the number of a good bankruptcy attorney while you're at it?

Relativity: without bad code there can be no good code.

I can't decide whether this is more "lame" or more "dodgy."

Aside from the fact that the joke is so weak, where does the money actually go, and in what proportions? What's the benefit of organizing this as a separate institution when all it's doing is printing up fancy-ass certificates? Wouldn't it make more sense for the jQuery, Postgres, ASF, etc folks to collaborate and print their own certificates?

Is this "Alliance" a corporation? A sole propietorship or partnership? A charity? Does it have a street address? A phone number? Any kind of regulatory oversight or transparency at all?

No? Didn't think so. I guess you can put me down for dodgy and lame in equal parts. Nice work if you can get it.

what a con

what's next. going to start your own religion?

wait...this is for real? good luck with that, not all programmers have money to burn like you big city slickers and your 100k+ salaries.

I'm with Practicality, you need to buy another offset for the bad html:
hef="http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-did-it-for-the-lulz"
;-)

We're still a way off from April 1st? I'd rather purchase some other offsets for the increase in hot air being produced here lately.

Would you please buy my Bad Blog Post Offset today?

Only a dollar per line of a Bad Blog Post.

Hurry up - offer valid only while stocks last!

you guys are getting a little to silly for your own good, come on get down off your high horse soon

I won't support projects like that because really who are you to decide which open source projects deserve the funding and which do not.

No thanks I think my money is better spent when I directly donate it to a project to my liking.

Why the fascination with bad code Jeff? I know plenty of developers who make it very difficult to find bad code in their work products.

Then again, these people know how to write code without the IDE constantly compiling, and know how to deal with case-sensitive parsers...

What about bad design, bad architecture? which could lead to a total failure product even with perfect codes. Should buy bad design offset first!

Ridiculous idea. Seriously. How obtuse can you get?

I write bad code. Everyday.

And I do it because of a few things:

- I work for a company. Deadlines are usually pressing and we cannot afford wasting time with good code that will invariably result in the same thing as bad code; i.e. an application

- Programming languages (all programming languages) encourage bad code. They practically beg you to write bad code. From the "shot your foot" languages like C or C++, to "save coders from themselves" languages like C# or Java, all languages make sure of one thing: If you write bad code, you will complete your project faster. Writing good code is only an afterthought.

- Users appreciate bad code better than they do good code. A patch is an highly anticipated event. A reason for celebration. Conversely, an application without patches lives a dull life in the noisy marketing land.

- Operating systems turn good code into bad code. They don't actually do it, of course. What they do is give the impression on the user your code sucks because your application fails. And it can fail because the operating sucks, or the operating system doesn't suck but you think it does because in fact what made your application fail was some device driver made by someone else. See the snowball?

...

So why on earth would I ever want to write good code? My bad code is better than any good code. I'm done with it faster, I'm respecting the programming language tenets, I get more market visibility with my continuous presence and I don't waste my time on things that some operating system, processor, driver or combination thereof can invariably ruin.

So you know where you can shove your certificates...

Wow, I lost a lot of respect for Jason Cohen and Eric Sink - Guys, what the hell are you thinking?

I thought this was a joke, but then I actually clicked on the link. Unreal. Aren't there better ways to get press or promote some open source projects?

Time to come back down to reality...

It is also so ironic that so many people who make a fortune in the software business decide that they want software to be free. (now that they are all set for life) I wonder why that is...

"So why on earth would I ever want to write good code?"

Well it might seem strange but some developers actually became developers because they love software development and not just because when you grow up you have to find a job.

The ASF is fighting bad code? How? By taking over subversion? Only if you don't count 'brokenly designed' as bad code.

No way I'm going there.

Sorry, forgot to mention ant. Really, no way.

You know, the Catholic Church once did this.
They got some really nice churches and cathedrals out of it.

another lame self promotion

Why should I do this rather than just giving money to those open source projects?

It seems that you're not achieving much apart from adding a layer of indirection and uncertainty over where the money goes...

Love the idea!
Although some "developers" would need something more like a blank cheque, hehe.
I hope all these efforts will help to dilute bad smells in Internet.

I want to know how many ppl will buy these..
So if people start buy these offsets..does it means we have solution to fix bad code..
I dont think so...Use the brain to fix bad code..not money..

What about offering "Theft for my own good" offsets for politicians? Or "Merit taken for someone else's actions" offsets for management? That's totally not fair, also because we're doing so much less damage than those guys...

But that's the internetz anyways, so nice joke :-) and that's a fun way to help OS projects... because you're not making any profit out of this, are you?

Jeff...you may write bad code but not me. My code is perfect, now stick that one in your butt :)

To summarize, you want those of us who earn a living writing code to subsidise those who give their work away for free, jeopardizing our own jobs in the process.

What I don’t get is why if these open source projects are so much better, why don’t they finance themselves by selling on the open market?

Jeez... what a naive idea! Like someone would just give away 5k in return for a jpeg file and the hope that it will be used to improve the quality of open source code. Give me a break.
Spend the money on Visual Studio 2008 and few re factoring tools. Much better investment if you ask me.

I have come to the realization that there is obvious bad code but then there is code that is good based on usage. By that I mean, sometimes reducing 5 lines of code down to a small segment of code doing the same thing more efficiently isn’t always a good thing, unless you are absolutely positively sure that chunk of code will never need to do anything else but what it does today and there is no need to edit it.

Sure it’s a fun little exercise for the programmer but it doesn’t always lead to productivity in the work place especially when you have several people maintaining that code. And the code that was written yesterday based on a specific need has to implement a few more needs today.

There is nothing worse they wasting time deciphering someone else’s code and then retrofitting it’s narrow because they were striving for the less is more golden chalice. This can be argued on both sides but I find simple basic easy to read code is often the better way to go, in applications that get revised often by multiple people, each with their own style of coding.

I guess what I’m saying is, sometimes beautiful code is in the eye of the beholder.

I, a dev behind the code offsets site, am utterly bedazzled by the comments I am reading here... let me list a few responses to some of these typical ones:

"Why wouldn't I just donate to the projects directly?"
- Nothing wrong with that at all as they're getting the same amount of money either way. 100% of the proceeds (read "the sale") go to the project you choose. At least now you have something amusing to hand out in your next code review, tack to your cubicle, or hand to the guy who breaks the build.

"I don't make enough money, these are too expensive, no one would buy $1000 worth, etc."
- The higher amounts are for amusement only, no one is expected to actually purchase them. If you cannot afford $1.50 for 3 of these things, I don't even know how to respond to that. I'm sure you've gotten at least $1.50 in value out of jQuery, for example.

"I would rather donate to project X..."
- Please do so, that's all we're encouraging here. If you want some offsets for your trouble, use the contact form on the site and suggest the project you'd like to add to our list.

"Aren't there better ways to promote these projects?"
- There may be different ways, but "better" is a subjective term. If I were on the receiving end of free money, I wouldn't be too upset about it. At this point, it's given the projects at least some free press.

"Feed the homeless instead of buying these, if only the money went to help poor people in the inner city, etc."
- Who says I can't do both? There are plenty of charities you can donate to if this is what you desire.

In the end, the complete pompousness displayed in the verbiage of the site is mere satire. Yes, we're aware that it doesn't work exactly like carbon offsets - that is irrelevant. The site is meant to be a fun and joking way to increase awareness for these types of projects.

@tim:
"Why the fascination with bad code Jeff?"

Since you've seem to have forgotten, the name is this blog is "Coding Horror."

It is a tradition on the internet that the Ministry of Truth and the Ministry of Love are run by different people.
So, here is yours truly with a complaint.

How do you actually get a competent, but civilised, non-arrogant, ordinary, non-insider, non-son-of-a-bitch to write code with?

I've emailed several programmers, small and big, leaders in open source, dealers in closed source, peddlers and meddlers in politics and hacking, friends, small folk with hearts, big folks with egos and without hearts, and even tried speaking to cute animals.

But no one seems to be interested in doing a project with me.
No, this is not your regular sissy complaint.
No, I am not a luser.
If anything, if you are feeling great objection to what you're reading, you're the PEBKAC, not me.
My only fault was I thought flame wars are about principles.
I found out much later they are about arrogant, if peaceful, b_stards quarrelling away like the soldiers of the Army of Anubis.

So, where do you get someone *ordinary* to write an *ordinary* program to make *ordinary* money?
Yeah, they always keep saying that a man is known by the company he keeps. I am blown by the company I've kept. Blown apart, in fact.
(phew! big load off my chest!)

Yeah, so where do you get plain ordinary simple straight programmers, the POJOs that actually get code written and you know, make customers happy and go to the next project, dont try to *ahem* save the world, and Greater Things (TM).

You like to post on the same topics over and over.
Please re-post where decent normal people coordinate over programs.

And where you are not forced to work under highly illustrious mentors who don't give a shit what you think about anything.

Really, when all advertised methods don't work over 3 years, you wonder what the whole thing is about? Truman show or something?

Yeah, I know you have my IP address.

The real money will be made in brain cell offsets.

orange

orange orange

damn

@John Rasch I wouldn't know jQuery if it fell on my foot (out of a webpage, I suppose), and ant & svn definitely cost me more than $1.50 each in frustration. I do pretty plainly refuse to use them both together on a single module/project.

@SW Because they are social objects, not commercial ones. The moment you start selling, the support goes away.

""It is, quite literally, the least you could do."

No, lierally the least I could do is nothing. Which seems about right."

hah... can't stop laughing. xD

Wow.

I mean, wow.

Perhaps I don't get the joke?

Clearly Jeff is no longer a programmer, but has joined the ranks of internet hucksters. I hope his advertisers read this blog to determine if they're getting their money's worth.

Ditto to Rick's sentiments.

Jeff, it's time you got a real job.

It's funny that you mention jQuery as a partner against bad code, you obviously haven't seen this line from their UI toolkit:

if(!((l-d < x1 && x1 < r+d && t-d < y1 && y1 < b+d) || (l-d < x1 && x1 < r+d && t-d < y2 && y2 < b+d) || (l-d < x2 && x2 < r+d && t-d < y1 && y1 < b+d) || (l-d < x2 && x2 < r+d && t-d < y2 && y2 < b+d))) {

It's from near the end of http://jquery-ui.googlecode.com/svn/tags/1.7.2/ui/ui.draggable.js

Micheil, why do you think they need the money? :)

Just wondering. Why are you using a set containing the empty set as logo?

@Micheil: This snippet seems to be a minified version of the code. I am pretty sure that it wasn't coded like that.

You know, I really thought this was funny when I read the title. I'm a little disappointed that there was some truth to it. Although I agree in principle about donating to open source projects, why wouldn't I just donate directly to a project I cared about? Or even more useful, offer a cash prize for the programmer that fixes a bug or adds a feature I want? What is being added to the process by adding a layer?

Sorry, but this just doesn't seem like the quality Jeff Atwood I've followed for years.

Shouldn't they be selling offsets in packages of powers of two? Why sell 100 offsets when they could be selling 128? I won't pay for 1000, but I might be convinced to buy 1024.

Are you sure the money goes to open source projects? Or does it go to paying the crack dealer, cos you guys seem to be smoking some serious stuff recently.

Do the offsets work against your new found heinous sin of extra spaces at the end of lines?

>> the money you spend on Bad Code Offsets really does offset bad code!

No it doesn't. Because I'm not a retard and I don't spend my money on "offsets" of any kind.

Maybe you could donate something to me so I don't write any bad code. Like $ 10000 in a monthly basis would suffice.

It seems that you have become like these rich upper-class women who has no time to do something useful, instead they do some sort of charitys to fill up their time and pretend they do something useful.
Heh, kind of amusing!! You should go back to your code-monkey mindstate!!!

If this stupid system was ever to take hold I'd rather the money is donated to schemes that would better train coders to be developers.

But first, you must be able to define what is 'quality' code. Even if you could, measuring by the line is silly. Some lines of code are more critical than others.

Irony?

---source---
Yes, this is partly tongue in cheek, but we aren't just doing it for the lulz.
---/source---

Gimme an R!

Talking about open source, do you still endorse Paint.NET now that it has officially gone closed source: http://blog.getpaint.net/2009/11/06/a-new-license-for-paintnet-v35/ ?

This is prohibitely expensive even for my "small" hobby projects dude.

I've seen too many people who are blatantly incompetent at their primary job function (all types, not just programming) and clearly don't care to think that this would have a chance. A vast majority of people who read this blog are not in the group of lazy incompetent surfers, and a vast majority of lazy incompetent surfers couldn't be bothered to read anything as long as this blog.

How many lines of code in SUN Java?

Reminds me of a April fools website...

Derek

Reminds me of an April Fools Day joke website...

Derek

Hilarious. Best idea ever to get geeks sponsor open source.

Lulz, memes are like dead jokes, except funnier because everyone repeats them all the time.

Thank you for your blog, I always get some helpful insights from it.

Anything to make a buck,...

s/envision/envisage/
Repeat for all the writing from all the business classes.

And you may want to read the day-care example from Freakonomics (read online free, here: http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/b56592/Freakonomics-Revised-and-Expanded-Edition/Steven-D-Levitt/?si=0) before you start letting people pay money for doing something they shouldn't :)

Your next step in ruining our industry Jeff (IT in case you forgot). I can't wait to your empire collapses.

Could be an amusing secret santa gift...:-)

I'm sorry to say this, but I think codinghorror.com just jumped the shark for me.

It was an interesting read, I wish you luck in your future writing endeavours. Time to move onto other blog-shaped pastures.

Shame on you Jeff, Shame

heh again no posts and last five posts were not so fun anymore as few years ago

heh okay I see SO.com takes all the energy. Although I miss quality content.

I don't think you know what "for teh lulz" means...

Speak for yourself, Jeff. Not everybody writes bad code. Everybody makes mistakes and sometimes bugs find their way into our software regardless of the quality of the code. To claim that we all write bad code seems more like you justifying bad code you've written by placing the blame on all of us.

nst> "Everybody makes mistakes and sometimes bugs find their way into our software regardless of the quality of the code."

That's what bad code is; code that contains mistakes and bugs. Do you have a different definition?

I don't believe in quality of open source, especially not if the site of opensource server developers was hacked multiple times.....

the captcha "buy viagra" should be part of your "anti ad" advertising site

"That's what bad code is; code that contains mistakes and bugs. Do you have a different definition?"

Bad code is code written without regard for safety, clarity, accuracy or efficacy. This is generally due to incompetence but it can also be the result of carelessness or simply not caring about quality. Even code written by the most competent programmer in the world may show bugs due to unforseeable consequences. Software can be extremely complicated. All test cases cannot be foreseen ahead of time.

If you want to call this "bad code" then that's fine. How do we distinguish between bad code that is just awfully written and bad code that is due to a rare mistake in logic or unforseeable interactions between software elements (including the user)? Are these the same thing? I don't think so. It's the difference between a virtuoso musician playing the wrong note in rare cases and a beginning musician playing the wrong note due to inexperience or incompetence.

Selling absolution? Didn't the catholic church try that at some point (think back)? It gave me the same lulz.

I would be more enthused if the code I'd be offsetting would be public domain. Not GPL. Not BSD. Public domain. Let's help *everyone*.

Ah, but who will be your Martin Luther?

This is interesting, what about people who write bad code for other open source projects? I will check it out though.

It amazes me that there are that many people who read this blog who have absolutely NO sense of humor. Come on people!

I think..the main point is missing and you are concentrating on funny part of it.

I think you are concentrating on funny part instead of real thing about bad coding

Speak for yourself, Jeff. Not everybody writes bad code. Everybody makes mistakes and sometimes bugs find their way into our software regardless of the quality of the code.

no true

yes indeed, I liked it a great subject too great a share, thanks
Dans Okulu

The frequency and value of your posts are declining.

I once urged coworkers to read this blog. Today, when talking about the fold, I mentioned that Coding Horror recently had an article about the fold. A coworker said that he has not looked at Coding Horror in a while. My response was, "Don't bother. That site has really gone downhill."

I was surprised at how honest that statement felt.

No. I don't want to give any money to those organizations.

Thanks a lot.Good idea...

Actually, I don't think tool is the reason of bad code.

It blongs to coder self.

Good informaton!

Could be a mess at all. If you write lots of bad code, you're going to need that extra money down the road to fix or just maintain your own mess, which you might otherwise send to a worthy cause such as bad code offsets.

If you don't mind me saying that but I don't think people would like to donate any amount for this type of organisation...

I tried to run this past my client but they turned it down... :-(

Same here, I would not donate.

I would not donate for that.

This isn't new. The following is from 1997 or earlier:

"We should sell 'bloat credits', the way the government sells
pollution credits. Everybody's assigned a certain amount of
bloat, and if they go over, they have to purchase bloat credits
from some other group that's been more careful."
-- Bent Hagemark

There's actually a very easy way to avoid writing bad code which I've seen very effectively practised at my workplace. The solution is to write no code at all, and either let other people do all the work (who then also have to do all the fixing) or let the end users scream in anguish.

Not only do you save money on buying bad code offsets, you also save time which you can spend on surfing the web. What more can one ask for?

I can't belive that you could say this ''A coworker said that he has not looked at Coding Horror in a while. My response was, "Don't bother. That site has really gone downhill." ''

This is another hideous project by Jeff Atwood. Trying to make more money cause he does not want to find a real job. Jeff stop sitting on your a** and find a job and stop begging for money.

"Yes, this is partly tongue in cheek...," is such a pathetic attempt to disguise how this is a despicable idea.

My interpretation is, "Yes, I realize how obnoxious and worthless this project is and how closely it resembles an internet scam. However, I am not entirely serious. If you are credulous enough to believe in this, then yes, I am serious. If you are offended by this idea, then default back to the tongue in cheek line (psst, it's my safety line)."

Im really starting to think Jeff is a f******* scammer with all these little sites he's creating. I love this one:

"Patron Members' financial contributions enable The Alliance to develop and support not-for-profit initiatives like Bad Code Offsets. An annual membership is currently $50.00; as a thank-you for contributing, we will mail you a black T-shirt with our logo."

For f**** sake, a 1 dollar hanes t-shirt is being sold by Jeff Atwood for $50. What a nut case. Then I read about the members involved and even Jon Skeet is in. What gives, you guys go find a damn job and stop begging for money.

Weasles.

Right next to atwood in the dictionary in big bold letters is the word PONDSCUM