Techies: Buy good karma
By Techgirl

This is so sweet that it is almost silly.  Or does living in a big Indian city like Mumbai make one a bit cynical?

The great religions of India have taught us many ways to acknowledge and make amends for our mistakes (many inadvertent) that we make in our lives.  We can have a havan and feed the poor outside the temple, do Kar Seva and even confess our sins. 

What happens if you are a computer programmer and have written bad code?  Keep in mind that till about 10 years ago, software engineering did not adhere to strict disciplines and processes.  If the code worked, it made its way into the computer system.  Quite often ‘fixes’ were made to the code in short turn around times, which worked but were untidy.  Strict deadlines were responsible for much of the bad code.

Now a number of high profile techies have got together and launched codeoffsets.com where you can made amends by buying ‘coupons’ for all the bad code you have written.  Not dissimilar to how countries buy carbon credits to balance out polluting industries.

How does Bad Code Offsets work?  Their website describes it as follows

“
The Bad Code Offset provides a convenient and rational approach for balancing out the bad code we all have created at one time or another throughout our lifetime—even when we can’t go back and fix it directly.

Denominated in Source Lines of Code (SLOC), every purchase will offset the desired quantity of SLOC and pave the way toward future code excellence. 

Money raised through the purchase of Bad Code Offsets supports the various Open Source Initiatives that are performing vital work towards the salvation of our future code base.

Every purchase of an offset today will take us one line of code closer to our goal of universal code excellence. Banish the bugs in your past as you help usher in a new age of software development.

Bad code arises for many reasons: lack of skill, insufficient time, abject neglect or poorly documented requirements for example. Bad Code Offsets are one step you can take to balance out the bad code that has gone before where you may not be in a position to provide a proper fix. Offsetting bad code also provides a salve to your conscience.
“

Before you laugh, do check out the highly regarded techies behind this project.  The guys behind this website include Alex Papadimoulis (Editor of The Daily WTF and managing partner of Inedo, a firm dedicated to best practices in software development), Mr. Sink (founder of SourceGear, author of Business of Software, and led the team that built the foundation for the Internet Explorer browser) and even Jon Skeet (Software engineer at Google London, Mr. Skeet is a Microsoft MVP).

All monies raised would go towards supporting open source projects like Apache, Drupal and FreeBSD.

Now only if someone can set up a similar website for Indian politicians and businessmen.  We could raise tens of crores every month.

Techgoss note: Techgirl is a senior Tech journalist who reports on the IT, KPO and KPO Sectors for a leading media house.  In her spare time, she dabbles in satire in her blog http://techgirltalk.blogspot.com