Comment your code—it’s a mantra they drill into you in Programming 101. I know, most of us took that class at age 5 or 6, but it’s still important 30 years later.

Of course, in those bygone days, we were probably programming in C (or maybe Java for you young’uns, or FORTRAN for the graybeards). Comments were there for your benefit as a programmer, and the compiler helpfully threw them away when building binaries for end-user consumption. You could put anything you wanted into your comments and not worry about them becoming public knowledge. Anything, including:

C XOR WITH 42405 TO ENCRYPT MY SECRET VALUE

or

/* This paranoid and performance-killing logic is here because
   the customer is a clueless f***ing anal-rententive nutcase. */

or

// I have a...

As I was crossing the US-Canadian border recently during my weekly commute between Seattle and Vancouver, the border guard interviewing me seemed quite puzzled by what I do. I told him I’m studying at Regent College, a graduate school of theology (or some consider it a seminary) in Vancouver, BC. “So you’re a minister?” he asked me. “No,” I answered, ”I’m a senior software engineer.”

So why is the co-founder and chief software architect of a Seattle internet startup studying in a religious program alongside Christian pastors, missionaries, and theological scholars? Would it not make more sense to be taking courses in MySQL or Java EE?

It’s for the simple reason…