Re:Ask HN: How to be productive with big existing code base
by james_s_tayler on Thursday February 28, 2019 @05:19AM
(#19270338)
I'll take this one step further and say if you truly think trash fires are acceptable and there exists no developer who can replace a trash fire with something warm and inviting then _youre_ the amateur.
I get what you mean though. I've seen dreadful results of some people who tried to replace a WinForms app with a WPF app and the people who did the WPF version totally half-baked their underlying framework. It was very amateurish. In contrast the existing framework built on WinForms was 90% baked. It simply had a lifecycle the developer had to understand (very difficult, nobody got it right) and was essentially only missing a final inversion of control layer to tie it all together. I added the missing layer and time to implement a new screen and number of bugs plummeted.
I thought it was crazy in 10 years of that code existing and hundreds of people having worked on it that _I_ was the one to spot that and go "hmm, you missed a spot" and have such a dramatic impact with a single week of work.
It still fucks with me to this day that _nobody_ was either capable or willing. That just blows my mind. It stuck out like a sore thumb to me. It seems to be the pattern thats emerging in my career though. I've come to understand it's a rare thing. So, fundamentally I agree with you're advice as it applies to most people. I just know first hand there are some people out there that understand exactly how to breathe new life into old systems and how to prevent new systems from decaying.
I get what you mean though. I've seen dreadful results of some people who tried to replace a WinForms app with a WPF app and the people who did the WPF version totally half-baked their underlying framework. It was very amateurish. In contrast the existing framework built on WinForms was 90% baked. It simply had a lifecycle the developer had to understand (very difficult, nobody got it right) and was essentially only missing a final inversion of control layer to tie it all together. I added the missing layer and time to implement a new screen and number of bugs plummeted.
I thought it was crazy in 10 years of that code existing and hundreds of people having worked on it that _I_ was the one to spot that and go "hmm, you missed a spot" and have such a dramatic impact with a single week of work.
It still fucks with me to this day that _nobody_ was either capable or willing. That just blows my mind. It stuck out like a sore thumb to me. It seems to be the pattern thats emerging in my career though. I've come to understand it's a rare thing. So, fundamentally I agree with you're advice as it applies to most people. I just know first hand there are some people out there that understand exactly how to breathe new life into old systems and how to prevent new systems from decaying.