This is what someone said to me while biking up a hill the other day.

I have a certain bike route I do that includes stopping at the supermarket along the way. It’s just over 5 miles. Obviously over the course of the entire route I return to the same place I started, but the topography varies along the way. But the simple fact of the matter is that the supermarket is at a lower altitude than the house, and about 2/3rds of the way along the route in the direction I go.

So when I tell people about biking this route, I point out that it’s sort of a double-whammy. When I get to the lower point in the route, I go shopping. To finish my loop, my bike is often heavier with groceries and I have all the altitude to gain back (which admittedly isn’t much, a bit over a 100′) in a short distance (maybe 2000′).  It was along this section that my erstwhile adviser offered his advice.  My reply of course was that “true, but home is that way!”, I said pointing up the hill.

Unfortunately, sometimes one can’t do it the easier way. One has to do it the hard way.

But, this leads into something else I wrote on Quora.com: Do Bad Programmers Know hey write bad code? I only partly addressed the question, but to sum it up, I think the worst don’t, but the best programmers do, and sometimes intentionally.

The truth is, we probably should always be writing the best code we can. It should handle error trapping and handling. It should validate inputs. It should fail gracefully.

But often, we need a one-off script. Something that gets the job done here and now.

I recently did a 5-minute lightning round for my SQL User Group on the benefits of using PowerShell. I took to quick and dirty scripts I had written and rewrote them a bit for the presentation.  Afterwards, one of the attendees asked me a few questions about my stylistic choices in the code.  He was right in general, but I pointed out what my goal was. My goal was more to show what PowerShell could do than to actually show how to write good code in PowerShell.  That said, I probably should have written slightly better code, but this got the job done. It definitely didn’t need error handling and the like. It was good enough.

And ironically, this post is sort of like that. (I love it when I can get meta on my own posts). I have about a dozen drafts I have saved in WordPress. Most have just a title and a quick set of notes on what I think I should write about. This post was mostly written and just needed a bit more to flesh it out.  It was easier this way than trying to come up with a new topic for this week. Hope you enjoyed it. (and to keep things even easier, I’m going to let WordPress use a random photo for it!)