Developer Laziness

Laziness is an interesting trait for developers. Opinions online vary from “it is good” to “it is bad” with everything in between.

I consider myself a lazy developer but in a good way: I hate doing the same boring stuff, which means I’d rather spend time on creating something efficient and reusable. DRY principle is the core value of The Lazy Dev Wizard Club. Experienced lazy developers also tend to proactively create features that we know someone eventually will ask for. (Sort of opposite of YAGNI but in a good way.) “Hey, nice program but can we get an execution log for it? – Here you go, way ahead of you.”

But there are also The Dark Wizards of Bad Lazy. You can thank those bast… err… folks for the vague error messages, copy-pasted code, bad documentation, ugly forms, inconvenient UI.

It is hard to resist the temptation of the dark side with its cookies and other baked goods. But resist we must. The best way to avoid giving in to Bad Lazy is to code like you are the user. For example, in SAP a material ID can be created generally (in MARA table) but also extended to be used in certain companies or warehouses. If your program checks whether material ID is available for company X, invest just a few seconds to check whether material ID exists at all. And offer different error messages based on that: material doesn’t exist vs material is not available for company X. Sometimes we just need to take one [minute] for the team to make life easier for many other people (which users are, surprisingly). Be a Good Lazy, not a Bad one. JP