About 80% of my job is fixing other people's crap. Specifically, people who were mainframers who were teaching themselves to code for the Web. So they built all these applications which were heady in the late '90s. But today, when Web 2.0 is approaching middle age, these things are piles of legacy crap. My job is not entirely to put lipstick on these pigs, but without proper attention, that'd be exactly what I'd be doing. Given proper time and attention, though, they're being rewritten, heavily refactored and updated. I'm working on one such project right now that may end up paving a pathway to limited fame/infamy -- it could place me in a position for actually SETTING some standards for coding and design within the department. (The funny part is, everything I'm doing is pretty common sense.) Or... or not. Time will tell, I guess.
For me the most important thing is the ability for a new developer to plug in and be productive with very little down-time at the start. That happens when code is readable and reasonably well-commented (to include where shared functions are located) and variables are notated. 100% of the legacy code I see has none of this.
About 80% of my job is fixing other people's crap. Specifically, people who were mainframers who were teaching themselves to code for the Web. So they built all these applications which were heady in the late '90s. But today, when Web 2.0 is approaching middle age, these things are piles of legacy crap. My job is not entirely to put lipstick on these pigs, but without proper attention, that'd be exactly what I'd be doing. Given proper time and attention, though, they're being rewritten, heavily refactored and updated. I'm working on one such project right now that may end up paving a pathway to limited fame/infamy -- it could place me in a position for actually SETTING some standards for coding and design within the department. (The funny part is, everything I'm doing is pretty common sense.) Or... or not. Time will tell, I guess.
For me the most important thing is the ability for a new developer to plug in and be productive with very little down-time at the start. That happens when code is readable and reasonably well-commented (to include where shared functions are located) and variables are notated. 100% of the legacy code I see has none of this.
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