A long time ago, I wrote a personal framework in PHP. I used it on a few projects and really enjoyed working on it. Eventually I moved away from it as I was required by work to use other tools. I miss working in a framework I designed, and owned. Even though it's definitely a mess of legacy code now, I still have fond memories.
OH ABSOLUTELY! There were numerous codebases that I loved perusing and working inside. I'll briefly list them and tell you why. I know it sounds strange but I'd like to see how they are doing today and who is maintaining them.
A dashboard - I spent an entire job working on a dashboard. I built it with Laravel 3 and Knockout. It was a horrible mess of an app but boy, I looked forward to working in it every single day.
The symfony app - probably the only "legacy" app that I've worked on. If it's still alive (and I'm pretty sure it is), it's been around for nearly a decade. The app was as enterprise as you can get. The "best" thing about it were all the very complicated queries that it built. You could also just peruse the codebase for days without hitting the same file twice. It was like a maze, or a city of code.
current old "apps" - or rather older sections of the product I'm working on. Some of it is a miss, some of it is pure gold. I love seeing the code I used to write. Sometimes it's good (MANY times it's bad) but there's a certain nostalgia I get when I'm working with my older code and a certain pride when that code makes sense several years later!
#3 is huge. At my job, we're constantly improving but we can't let any part of our application lag. Or if we do, we get stern reminder from our users (via bug and performance issues) that we need to fix that. So I'm used to seeing and rewriting my own code almost constantly.
EDIT I should mention that none of this means that I think the old code was fantastic or great. But having rewritten a ton of older code, it doesn't intimidate me or make me feel ashamed. Slap a few tests on it, split it up in a bunch of smaller functions and in no time, you have code that suddenly makes way more sense and is totally doable!
Oh yes! The project I worked on for more than 3 years in my previous company was the best. We created a scalable distributed GIS-system for our cartographers.
I loved working on it. It's been more than 2 years since I left the company, but I still miss it sometimes. :)
I had a project I worked on for a bit to try and make a moddable Pokemon game. It started out as a desire to make a Pokemon game with all the regions but after I learned that all the fan games were made with RPG Maker (a $20 product (which can do more I know) to make a game that would have to be given away for free) I wanted my game to be able to do more. It would have a Region API and would ask you if you want to deposit your Pokemon into the PC when arriving at a new Region for the first time. I was making decent progress but then Pokemon Uranium was shut down, so I decided to stop working too. I didn't want to spend all that time on a passion project just to be sued by Nintendo. If they ever had a change of heart, I'd still like to do it, and keep the files to this day
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
I used to code on a talker back in the day, and I miss the hacky way everything fit together, with sometimes multiple people rewriting bits of the code during the day and re-compiling and (hopefully) seamlessly restarting while active users were logged in and chatting.
A lot of my conversation was me apologising for breaking things, and we had no version control to speak of so it was all a bit of a communal toilet. But it was a fun thing to be part of.
The last Oracle data warehouse I built, for a telecom company, is the one I look back on.
I was the sole developer/designer/documenter, and handled everything from requirements through ETL (in PL/SQL) to storage and Business Objects reports.
In the last year I was developing and supporting it, it ran without error 365/24, and had complete documentation in the form of nested data flow diagrams.
Having said that, I don't miss that world. Too corporate, too commutey.
Latest comments (27)
Wow! What is it like to write drivers? I literally have no idea what driver code looks like or how it functions.
Also, kudos on DN3D and Doom drivers! I still play those games!
Had to maintain a PHP code-base once. It had a file with over 7000 lines of code. About 3 or 4 classes.
Good times '_'
A long time ago, I wrote a personal framework in PHP. I used it on a few projects and really enjoyed working on it. Eventually I moved away from it as I was required by work to use other tools. I miss working in a framework I designed, and owned. Even though it's definitely a mess of legacy code now, I still have fond memories.
OH ABSOLUTELY! There were numerous codebases that I loved perusing and working inside. I'll briefly list them and tell you why. I know it sounds strange but I'd like to see how they are doing today and who is maintaining them.
#3 is huge. At my job, we're constantly improving but we can't let any part of our application lag. Or if we do, we get stern reminder from our users (via bug and performance issues) that we need to fix that. So I'm used to seeing and rewriting my own code almost constantly.
EDIT I should mention that none of this means that I think the old code was fantastic or great. But having rewritten a ton of older code, it doesn't intimidate me or make me feel ashamed. Slap a few tests on it, split it up in a bunch of smaller functions and in no time, you have code that suddenly makes way more sense and is totally doable!
Oh yes! The project I worked on for more than 3 years in my previous company was the best. We created a scalable distributed GIS-system for our cartographers.
I loved working on it. It's been more than 2 years since I left the company, but I still miss it sometimes. :)
Here's a bunch of articles I wrote about it:
smartpuffin.com/tag/fiji/
There is a company that is still using a completely custom invoicing and billing software written by me 16 years ago. A PHP software.
The software I write today, which is functional, reactive, progressive, declarative, asynchronous, etc etc does not last that much. 🤷♂️
That's an awesome example of why is more important to write code that just works than fancy "good quality" code.
I had a project I worked on for a bit to try and make a moddable Pokemon game. It started out as a desire to make a Pokemon game with all the regions but after I learned that all the fan games were made with RPG Maker (a $20 product (which can do more I know) to make a game that would have to be given away for free) I wanted my game to be able to do more. It would have a Region API and would ask you if you want to deposit your Pokemon into the PC when arriving at a new Region for the first time. I was making decent progress but then Pokemon Uranium was shut down, so I decided to stop working too. I didn't want to spend all that time on a passion project just to be sued by Nintendo. If they ever had a change of heart, I'd still like to do it, and keep the files to this day
Absence makes the heart grow fonder
I used to code on a talker back in the day, and I miss the hacky way everything fit together, with sometimes multiple people rewriting bits of the code during the day and re-compiling and (hopefully) seamlessly restarting while active users were logged in and chatting.
A lot of my conversation was me apologising for breaking things, and we had no version control to speak of so it was all a bit of a communal toilet. But it was a fun thing to be part of.
The last Oracle data warehouse I built, for a telecom company, is the one I look back on.
I was the sole developer/designer/documenter, and handled everything from requirements through ETL (in PL/SQL) to storage and Business Objects reports.
In the last year I was developing and supporting it, it ran without error 365/24, and had complete documentation in the form of nested data flow diagrams.
Having said that, I don't miss that world. Too corporate, too commutey.