darrenhobbs
We had 12 beefy servers powering our site. So I rock up and realise we're not using any of Silverstream's features, and its just acting as a servlet container. Big boss had moved onto bigger and better bossing by now so wasn't around to stop me.
After a couple of weeks of investigation, we demonstrated that Caucho Resin is better in every way. Fraction of the cost, starts super fast and runs like lightning. Great. We happily switch over and all was well for almost a week.
A few days in the head of Ops barrels up and demands to know if this was all my fault.
"Ummm, yeah?"
"Great. What the fuck am I supposed to do with the other 11 servers??"
I think they'd had to fight for budget for enough hardware to run the site with Silverstream, and young me had just made them look incompetent. They forgave me eventually...
* I actually like Silverstream's core ideas. It was just a little ahead of its time, and stored code in the db. And was 12x too slow.
Refactoring helped me start to understand the 'why' and 'when'. Why is design A better than design B? When is it time to tidy up this code? Which choice will be easier to change later? That kind of thing.