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Discussion on: How would you describe the quality of the codebases you've worked on in your career?

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Ryan Brown

Frightening, Faulty, Functional, and occasionally beautiful.

Fit for purpose (or not), Fit for use (depending on how you use it)

I started working at a single (then two) product company, and worked hard to bring up the quality of the codebase from the cargo-cult-coding introduced by the CS Major Manager and the much maligned previous developers. (Monolithic singletons so as to check the Object Oriented box as an example

For the last 10+ years I've been at a non-it company that has a substantial in-house built collection of smaller apps and utilities. These have of course varied providence including fully contracted build, in house built by contractors and in house built by employees plus every combinations of these. Some solutions are as small as a single script consisting of less than 30 loc. Others are full on multi-component ecosystems of interdependent tools.

In most cases the quality of the code was moderately correlated with the individual contributors. We had several High-Quality devs pass though and I've been lucky to learn from them. Some have been instrumental in my own developer journey. When I have to review/revise a project that was created by them, it is generally a much more pleasant experience than some of the others.

I endeavour to continue their legacy, and improve.

I was gifted with public feedback recently from one of them who had left and returned as a contractor. It was that when @ryencode writes code, it's build properly and is easy to understand and extend. Coming from one of my former mentors, it was an amazing boost.