Sign your name on everything

I recently heard an anecdote that reminded me of a tip from one of my favourite software-related books – The Pragmatic Programmer.

In it, the authors advise readers to…

Sign Your Work
Craftsmen of an earlier age were proud to sign their work. You should be, too.

Their emphasis is on taking pride in your work and accepting responsibility for it too. But the anecdote I heard showed that signing your work can be useful advertising too.

The consultant telling me the story had just received a call from a company he had worked at many years ago, asking him if he was available to do some more work for them.

All the people he had worked with had long since moved on, but the person assigned to review his old test scripts had found his name in a comment in the source code. Since they were looking for a consultant to do the work anyway, he was suddenly at the top of their list.

From now on, I am adding a small header with

• Full Name
• Company Name
• Email Address
• Mobile Number

to every piece of code I write.