I Opened a Time Capsule and Found... Production Code
There's something beautiful about history. The pyramids. Ancient texts. A perfectly preserved GeoCities site. But nothing prepared me for the archeological dig that was default.asp. It wasn't in a museum, it wasn't under glass -- it was running a live, customer-facing website, and people were using it.
When I first opened the folder labeled Website_BKP_FINAL_FINAL, I expected a polite little README file. What I found instead was a jungle of VBScript, inline SQL, and HTML table layouts that stretched endlessly, like Indiana Jones falling into a snake pit made entirely of <font> tags.
I didn't just inherit a codebase. I inherited a legacy. The kind of legacy you talk about in therapy.
When "Best Practices" Meant "It Works on My Machine"
In the early 2000s, source control was a shared network drive. CI/CD was yelling across the room, "Hey, I uploaded it to the FTP -- don't touch it!" And testing? Oh sweet summer child, testing was refreshing the page and hoping the page refreshed.
The code was a living monument to the Law of Duct Tape: if something breaks, slap more code on top until it stops making noise. The original devs didn't follow design patterns; they followed vibes. Business logic was sprinkled across multiple .asp pages like croutons in a chaotic salad. Some of it ran only on Thursdays. Some of it depended on a mysterious config.old.bak.bak file that no one dared delete.
And yet... it worked. Kinda. Mostly. Until you looked at it funny.
The Comments Were Written by Someone Who Hated Me Personally
You know what's worse than no comments? Comments that feel like passive-aggressive stiky notes from a ghost. Things like:
' Don't change this, it breaks everything
' TODO: Fix this someday (ha ha)
' Magic happens here - don't ask
These weren't annotations. They were threats. These lines weren't guiding me -- they were daring me. I found a function named ProcessData2 that was 614 lines long. No parameters, no return value, and absolutely no mercy. One comment simply read: "lol." Just "lol." What did he mean by that? What was he laughing at?
I wasn't just refactoring. I was decoding a diary written by someone who slowly descended into madness -- and wanted me to follow.
Global Variables: Because Who Needs Boundaries?
In modern software, we talk about encapsulation, scoping, dependency injection. In this codebase? Every variable was global. Every. Single. One.
Variables like user, temp, and flag roamed the application like unsupervised toddlers at a fireworks stand. You'd be in cart.asp, and suddenly a variable called temp would hold a database connection for the login system. Why? Because the entire application was a shared space. It was the open office floor plan of programming.
I once tried to rename a variable. Just one. Within five minutes, I'd accidentally broken the entire login flow and the contact form started sending messages to the accounting team.
Boundaries weren't just crossed -- they were never established.
Debugging with Response.Write and Prayer
Forget breakpoints. Forget stack traces. The only way to know what the code was doing was to make it talk. So we did what every desperate dev in 2005 did: we Response.Writed our way through the darkness.
The screen looked like a ransom note made of variable dumps: UserID=42, Session("CartTotal")=null, IT SHOULDN'T BE NULL. We didn't just log errors - we interrogated the page. Sometimes you'd forget to remove the debug lines, so the homepage would welcome users with a cheery "conn is not Nothing."
If you were lucky, the issue was obvious. If you weren't you'd spend three hours debugging only to discover it was a typo in a .inc file last modified during the Bush administration.
Every Deployment Is a Seance
Deploying this application was not a process -- it was a ritual. You didn't just upload files. You summoned the will of the code gods.
First, you'd light a candle (optional, but spiritually useful). Then you'd FTP into the server, rename the old file with a .bak, and pray you didn't miss a semicolon somewhere. If something broke, you'd restore the backup and tell management the server needed to "clear its cache."
There was no rollback. There was only regret.
Even now, years later, I still twitch when I hear the words "classic ASP." And yet... I maintain it. Because beneath the chaos, beneath the spaghetti logic and whispered curses in the comments, this code still runs. It's not pretty. But neither is love.
And somehow, against all odds, I love this cursed little monster of an app.
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