"In late 2009, I started a new job at a large logistics corporation," Nikos writes, "it was on my first day that I learned that 'quality' and 'best practices' can mean vastly different things to different people. Within my first week, I learned that I should probably ask a lot more questions about the system I will be spending 8 hours a day maintaining. Within my first month, I started counting my days."

"I've kept sane over the past year by telling myself that, one day, I would submit this whole thing to Alex at The Daily WTF. But I was never able to do that. Not because I was afraid (I'm sure I could have redacted/anonymized the code just fine), but because there was no way I could figure out how to compress this entire company and system into a single, concise story. And that's when I remembered about the Representative Line series.

//Status (none, active, finished - default value is false)
public String status;

"The more you look at the code and its accompanying comment, the more you understand how very, very different 'quality' and 'best practices' are over here."

[Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!