Stinky was 22 year old youngster who thought he was a Visual Basic god and as a god, he communicated with other mortals around him only because he had a good heart. He used every opportunity to emphasize that he was born to be a developer and that he tried almost every technology that could come on your mind. C, Unix, HTML, Visual Basic - you name it. When Bojan once mentioned that he was familiar with web and HTML for quiet some time, more precisely from 1994 when he bought his first modem and Mosaic browser, Stinky replied with patronizing smile on his face: "Wow, why so late? I started to program HTML and web in 1990." That meant he started with HTML when he was twelve years old and three years before the first release of WWW standard.

Degree? Certificate? Nooooooo - Brainbench!

Stinky never came farther from high school. Unlike most programmers who started their education with mathematics and programming oriented high school, Stinky finished Geological and Mining high school, where he has definitely never learned basic principles of mathematics, logic and structured programming. He has also never tried to study computer science, the logical choice of most programming oriented high school graduates. He would explain that by saying he was too smart and talented to waste his time there and that you could become a great programmer just by experience. Do we have to tell you how many books on programming Stinky read in his life?

Besides ignoring studying and books, Stinky also has never pursued any official developer certificate, for example MCSD. However, he proudly mentioned to everybody that he was one of the top ten Croatian Visual Basic developers on Brainbench site.

The anecdote that best reveals how little Stinky knew about the programming started when he asked Bojan to help him solve the following problem:

After Bojan recovered from shock of realizing Stinky didn't know basics of Logical Algebra, he replied that it was enough to put variable = Not Function(). Stinky went to check it out and after few minutes he cheerfully shouted: "It works!". Bartol was a witness to whole scene and few moments later he said to Bojan– "You see, my friend, to hell with your education, your degree in computer science and the tons of books you read. You don't need any of that to be a champ developer like Stinky. Just learn copy-paste method, remember all the properties of Janus Gridex and ActiveBar control, and the world is yours."

There is no hygiene exam on Brainbench

Stinky got his nickname when it became obvious that the prime source of the unbearable stench that spread through the office wasn't just Stinky's spaghetti code but the author himself. The Visual Basic god didn't care much about taking showers, using deodorants or changing clothes regularly. What surprised Bojan and Bartol even more was the fact that he has lived with his girlfriend for quite some time. "How can she tolerate that smell, my wife would kill me if I forgot to take shower and went to work.", Bojan wondered. "Maybe she lost the sense of smelling or maybe she also has such terrible odour, so they are compatible", Bartol added.

Bojan will always remember the day when he realized how terrible Stinky's odour is. It was hot summer day and since Dodoni didn't find it necessary to invest in air conditioner, the poor developers used fans to cool themselves. One of those fans was pointed towards Bojan. At some moment Stinky stood up from his chair and approached Bojan because he wanted to discuss some programming issues. Unfortunately for Bojan, he stood directly in front of running fan and while he was joyfully explaining his problem, Bojan was practically choking of the unbelievable stench coming from his colleague. It was worse than everything he experienced before.
The other anecdote that also proves how little Stinky cared about the hygiene was told by Bartol. One morning he went to toilet hoping to unload big burden from his body. Although the Dodoni bathroom was always in bad condition, he was still very shocked when he entered. Namely, one of his colleagues forgot to flush the toilet and he could see the big brown "Mr. Kinky" and the pile of used toilet papers inside the toilet seat. When he summoned all his colleagues and asked who was responsible for such inconsiderate act, Stinky just responded: "Oops, sorry. I was in a hurry."

Stinky code convention or "Monkey banging randomly on the keyboard would write a better code"

Since this site is mostly about the development and not the hygiene, we will also say few words about the Stinky's style of coding and his working habits. Simply put, Stinky's programming could be best described as vulgar, heroic, code-like-hell Visual Basic copy-paste programming, without following any established standard or good programming practice. He loved to use global variables, short and cryptic type names (e.g. instead of rstCustomers or rstProjects he just wrote trs), "magic" numeric and string constants, huge structures, massive hard coded SQL queries spanning tens of lines of code, two characters indentation instead of standard four and so on. Is it necessary to explain how anybody who had to maintain that horror felt?

When speaking of his programming style, Stinky used to say that he hated classes because they were unnecessary complex and inefficient. Instead, he used structures whenever possible. He also didn't think that COM components were any good. To quote the master: "Well, at the beginning we tried COM components, especially Patrik was agile about that, but we encountered many problems with that compatibility stuff, new version of the application didn't work with old version of components or vice versa. So, to make things simpler, I just threw away all that component stuff and put everything into one exe file. Since then we haven't got similar problems. Who needs COM anyway?"
When Bojan heard that, he was shocked. It didn't occur to Visual Basic god that maybe he didn't understand at all what binary compatibility meant and why application crashed in the first place. He also resisted the temptation to ask Stinky about the IDL, GUIDs and other COM related stuff so familiar to C++ developers. He knew that Stinky wouldn't show that he didn't have a clue about that but would rather say "Yes, of course I know about all that, but it's not important at the moment."

In fact, Stinky and his followers practiced totally wrong way of solving problems. Instead of trying to better understand the problem and learning what they didn't know, they would just solve the problem in fast and familiar way, although it was obvious that it was wrong and that one day they or some other person would have trouble maintaining such a solution. The main reason for such behaviour was because they didn't want to show that there were things they didn't understand and they thought that the only good solution was a fast solution.

In Stinky's vocabulary "code reuse" was interpreted as "copy-paste". Senka Lukavic once said for him that he was programming only with three keys on the keyboard - Ctrl, C and V (shortcuts for copy/paste commands in most editors). She was also very annoyed by this programming style because she had to debug Stinky's garbage on many occasions.
To make things worse, his copy-paste abilities weren't limited just to source code. He also used the same technique for all other application elements. For instance, if he had to develop a new form in VB application, he would just copy one of the existing forms and adapt it. He didn't care if he copied 90% of the same functionality together with user interface elements and produced the maintenance nightmare. Why would he care? He usually delegated debugging and maintenance of his code to losers like Senka who didn't come to the top 10 on Brainbench. In fact, instead of complaining they should have been grateful for the privilege to debug and correct his majesty's shitty code.

Speed, speed and only speed

The only criteria Stinky used when evaluating some person's programming abilities was how fast he could produce a code. The quality and readability of the code didn't matter, just make it quick so application could meet schedule. Nearly every project in Dodoni started with impossible schedule and Zakro and Erich forced people to forget about the anything else but to deliver on time. Many of them resisted such pressure and insisted on at least some level of planning and quality control, which made them unpopular in Erich's and Zakro's eyes. On the contrary, Stinky happily accepted such a policy and it made him de facto a head developer in Dodoni, although he didn't bear an official title. Still, he was the only person to sit in the same room with Zakro and he was the one Zakro trusted the most and whom he consulted when making estimates and planning for future projects.
The sad truth is that even such crazy code-like-hell and speed-only strategy didn't result in meeting deadlines. Besides from getting the product late,  clients were also complaining because they've gotten unstable and buggy application that crashed much too often to be normally used in production. After few such deliveries, some of the projects were cancelled and Dodoni lost some of the perspective clients. It was obviously not a problem to Erich, as long as he could pull his connections and find new accounts, or better to say, new opportunities to undermine his reputation.

We wouldn't like to end a story about Stinky without mentioning his business ethics and morale. Let's quote Bartol: "One day Stinky and me were the only people in the office and he confided me his working philosophy. I don't know why, he probably thought I couldn't wait to learn from him. Anyway, he said that his motto was - I do the job right if I am paid adequately. In other words, if he gets bigger salary, he would try harder and pay more attention to quality. If he is not satisfied with his wage, he would just do it quick-and-dirty and produce the garbage without any regret."
Although Stinky had more than solid salary regarding his talent and skills (900 EURO was nice amount in Croatian IT at that time), he thought he was significantly underpaid and that Dodoni should better honour his remarkable talent. Few months before quitting Dodoni, he put his desperate thoughts into action and demanded a 100% salary increase, but even Zakro and Erich weren't that stupid to believe he is worth so much and they denied his request.

Examples for "coding horror" collection

In time Bojan realized that Stinky picked his programming style from Patrik. At the time when Stinky came to Dodoni, Patrik was already very demoralized and programmed mostly quick-and-dirty shortcuts, but Stinky knew so little about programming that he thought it was the only way how to develop applications. As he started to copy more and more code segments from Patrik's modules, he dug himself deeper into dirty, monolithic, copy-paste VB mud. Although on many occasions Bojan tried to show Stinky there are better solutions and software architectures than one he currently used, like for example Engine-Class-Collection, it didn't come to Stinky's mind. He always ignored such suggestions and continued to develop in wrong way, mostly because he thought he was too smart to listen to other people's advice.
Among many shitty code snippets created by Stinky, there was one that Bojan particularly remembered and that haunted him for a long time. It was an ASP module that Stinky wrote for DAMP 2 web application, Bojan's first big project in Dodoni. The code in that module was like a rotten apple put in the basket with other fresh apples. It was ugly, dirty and so different from other ASP modules that Bojan wrote. After thinking for a while, Bojan realized he had no choice but to delete it and write it again, if he wanted to preserve the quality and his good reputation. That "coding horror", to quote Steve McConnell in his classic Code complete, had constructs like this one:
 

for x = -1 to c   if trs.EOF = true or x > 100 then     exit for   end if c = c + 1 (some business action) next

Bojan studied this part for a long time trying to understand what was Stinky intention when he wrote that code. Finally, he realized that Stinky went through the recordset and for each record performed the same business action. When he asked the author why he hadn't used simple and standard Do-until loop instead of this totally confusing and illogical for loop, in which he incremented the loop counter in the body of the loop, Stinky cheerfully replied, using his irritating, high pitch, fairy-like voice: "Well, I wanted to experiment a little and see if I could achieve the same without using Do loop. It is boring to program the same way all the time. That 'for-loopy' seemed like a real refreshment to me."
"Yes, deleting that horror was also a refreshment to me", Bojan thought and ended the conversation in hope he would preserve his mental health and sanity by not arguing with Stinky. There was no point in explaining to him why his solution was bad, especially in terms of quality and ease of maintenance, because Stinky found nothing wrong in writing unreadable code, for at least two reasons:

• If you write the code that is hard to read and comprehend, you become very important to your organization because you are the only one who can maintain that crap
• You are better programmer if you write more complex code. Those who cannot understand it or need to spend much time on it are losers.