I want to write a new article on the sort of mistakes (particularly exploitable ones) that developers make when working under pressure and to tight (in fact, almost unrealistic) deadlines.
Actually re-creating that pressure, though, is hard. Over time, I've managed to instil some level of discipline into myself, so that I think about the ramifications of (most) LoC that I write. It's not that I don't make mistakes, but that I'm more interested in what mistakes are likely to be made when that discipline isn't present (because there isn't time) and the developer is rushing.
So, to try and create that situation, the intention is to fulfil this project whilst fairly drunk, based on the theory that the alcohol will lower my inhibitions and (hopefully, seriously) undermine that discipline.
The project will have two versions - DrunkMe 1, and SoberMe 1. The first will be the initial implementation, whilst the second will result from a (careful) audit of the first - the resulting commits should help highlight the mistakes made. The finished project will almost definitely still contain bugs and issues though.
The project itself is to write a browser based Instant Messaging Platform - effectively a poor man's (and probably even uglier) Slack. An IM platform was chosen because it's privacy sensitive - users talk about all kinds of things in "private" chats.
To ensure the pressure is on, it should be relatively feature complete:
It will be left to DrunkMe to decide what (if any) frameworks to use. That decision will be treated as binding technical debt - SoberMe will have to find a way to fix issues around that decision, as the "company" won't fund rewriting from scratch
The aim is to have DrunkMe complete the work within a couple of evenings
Basically, this project is a bit of fun to try and collect some data on the result of building under pressure (though, in truth, it might only reflect the result of drinking and working..... we shall see)
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