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Pankaj Gupta
Pankaj Gupta

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What's the one file in your codebase everyone's afraid to open?

#coding #programmers #webdev #discuss

Every team has one. The file nobody wants to touch.

It's usually not even that long. It's just old enough, tangled enough, and load-bearing enough that everyone's quietly agreed to leave it alone unless it's on fire.

Mine is a 200-line utils file, and somewhere in the middle is this:

function formatData(data) {
  return formatDataHelper(data);
}

function formatDataHelper(data) {
  return formatDataHelperFinal(data);
}

function formatDataHelperFinal(data) {
  return data;
}
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Three functions. Zero transformation. I don't know who needed this or why, but I'm too scared to delete it in case something, somewhere, depends on the ceremony.

What's yours? Function name and crime optional but encouraged.
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Pankaj Gupta •

Also just remembered we have a function called handleStuff() that handles exactly one specific edge case from a client request two years ago. Not stuff, plural. One stuff. Nobody's renamed it because the PR that introduced it is somehow still referenced in three other tickets.