• ray10k (unregistered)

    I do love me some stories of people looking back at the stuff they made before, and cringing at how little they knew back then.

  • Senior Dev (unregistered)

    Already "copy pasted" to my project. Now I do not need to write my own string matching library.

  • Darkenon (unregistered)

    Have you heard of Glumpy?

  • Brian (unregistered) in reply to ray10k

    So true. My first real project was creating a database for my mom's company (yes, I was the Boss's Kid), and it was mostly an exercise in teaching myself to code with Access and VBA. Of course this was in the days before Google, so I had to rely solely on the built-in documentation. I did manage to cobble together a working application, but now that I'm all grown up and professional, I shudder to think of what that system might look like if I went back to it now.

  • Zenith (unregistered)

    Many years ago, right out of college, I worked on a printing company's workflow manager, translating it from Fox Pro to C#. At the time, I only had some internship experience in VB6, which was somewhere in between. People dump on VB but this school was all Java all the time with no Java jobs in the area so I was thankful to have experience in anything else. With the move to .NET (1.1 by the way), this Delphi plug-in for sending data (cover pages - "job 17601 (yellow pages competitor)") to the printers stopped working. I figured out I could send PostScript straight to the printer after generating it from a GhostScript driver but I knew very little about sockets. The way I read the documentation, I was only guaranteed that 1 byte would transfer per call, so that's what I did, sent it 1 byte at a time.

    Imagine my surprise when, a decade later, I was doing another contract at the company and that code was still there.

    That sort of helped me nope my way out of there. I was supposed to work on some 9-tier XML-based control panel that only worked on Chrome and had no way to generate test data for me to, you know, run unit tests on. When I saw nobody had even updated my code to use buffers correctly, I figured I had no chance of correcting any of the problems with the control panel. That and the company announcing it was splitting into 3 different companies. Contractors are often second class citizens anyway (unless they're here on visas) so who knew what was going to happen with this breakup.

  • DQ (unregistered) in reply to Brian

    Probably exactly the same as you left it...

  • Jim B (unregistered) in reply to Zenith

    I was a contractor with said printing company back in 2016. I saw that code. When I was there it was what the lead developer called "a tightly coupled mess".

  • Hasseman (unregistered)

    And I implemented functions for reading and writing ini-files in VB1 long time ago ...

  • b.a. freeman (unregistered)

    back in the day, i needed to match filenames on a VAX for a low-priority project, and i had some time to kill, so i wrote a pattern-matcher (definitely not a RE replacement, since i didn't even know what REs were) that implemented the '*' and '?' wildcard characters that the VAX CLI (and lots of other CLIs as well) implemented. i had a lot of fun with it, but when i discovered REs, i left it behind.

    i sincerely hope nobody ever sees that embarrassment, but U never know ...

  • Zenith (unregistered) in reply to Jim B

    Sure hope you're talking about the Chrome abomination! From what I can tell (missing some information), I resolved alot of coupling issues from my ASP version when I moved it back to the desktop. I really struggled with the limitations of stateless thin clients and it showed. Wish I had more than just some screenshots and the LPR/socket code.

    As for the Chrome abomination, the way it was related to me, the entire development team, save one, had picked up and left in very short order. The developer that stayed (let's call him Jack) did so on condition of being allowed to work remotely. I never saw him, or anybody else for that matter, after my first day. They'd started moving developers around between my interview and my start date, so I was set up in a semi-abandoned facility. Never even saw my supposed supervisor, not even when I turned in my badge six weeks later.

    I don't really blame Jack too much. He struck me as overwhelmed with putting out fires. However, that he wouldn't help me set up a build environment was very frustrating. I remember having this assignment to add a column to table. While Jack said they didn't use Entity, the hoops were very similar and required changes to a dozen different files plus batch scripts or else it wouldn't show up. When I checked it in, he wanted to know if I tested it, so I replied with a screenshot. That's when the build environment came up. I was supposed to, somehow, unit test a UI change...using this second project attached to the main solution....except all it did the instant it tried to reference the main project was crash. No logs in the usual places. Call me crazy but that's a bad sign when a fresh pull just doesn't work.

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered) in reply to Zenith

    I believe I also have had the joy of working at said company 2 years ago, although not with the specified code. Are you talking about the core system that they needed to split between the 3 new companies so each one would have its own instance?

    I worked on a project that focused on retail in store marketing, and only indirectly interfaced with the core system. When I joined the team, it was the poster child on how to do agile development, but things degraded slowly and surely. Timelines were missed, pressure applied from above to add new features, no time for proper design, and not being able to address technical debt led to the project's demise. My direct boss was fired, the project was off shored, and my boss's boss left at some point as well.

  • Eric Gregory (github)

    Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll write my own regular expression parser." Now they have three problems.

  • o11c (unregistered) in reply to Darkenon

    Or you know, just realize that the Mesa implementation works even if all you have is a CPU.

  • Darkenon (unregistered) in reply to o11c

    Still doesn't work with Numpy arrays.

  • Zenith (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous Coward

    I had to dig through my e-mail records for the correct term but does "Custom Routing" sound familiar?

    About two weeks before I left, I was hauled into a room with four or five people I'd never seen before with three more on the phone from, I think, Illinois to talk about a feature I'd never heard of in an application I'd never heard of. After the meeting, I couldn't find any of these people in the directory and in fact never heard from any of them again. It was surreal, like they had me confused with somebody else. Last time I remember being that confused in a developer job was listening to people at a Harrisburg company rave and rave about the wonders of Service Bus without being able to tell me where the Main() function was so I could do something with it.

  • Mac the Knife (unregistered)

    After SinclairBASIC I cut my teeth on DBase3+. Years later I realised that I had reinvented the wheel several times in my code. Still, the program gave the worked reliably, had strict input sanity-checks throughout and at least I knew why I was getting what. Good learning experience and I got to like the language. Never bothered to recode it.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Zenith

    That's precisely the sort of situation the word "Kafkaesque" was minted for.

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