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As someone who has rewritten software with the benefit of hindsight and experience... I'm still in awe of how simple and functional my old (sometimes crashy) co
by cheez 10y ago
As someone who has rewritten software with the benefit of hindsight and experience... I'm still in awe of how simple and functional my old (sometimes crashy) code was without any forethought.
- dasil003 10y agoYeah, one of the first professional jobs ca. 2001 was to replace the student group registration form and database at my 40k-student state university. I replaced an old ColdFusion app with a few pages of PHP backed by MySQL. The design was horrendous, the error handling worse, and yet somehow it was an incredible leap forward in terms of performance and UX. I think the bottom line is that there is often very juicy low hanging fruit that you can get to just by a minimal amount of knowledge and sheer force of will. The deeper knowledge and experience will give you a lot more things to think about which will help with edge cases, scalability, maintainability, robustness, etc; but while those things may be necessary for some projects, in many cases they end up bringing only small marginal gains. I'm at the point in my career now where I'm actively cultivating beginner's mind to avoid being paralyzed by my knowledge of all the ways things can go wrong.
- ben_jones 10y agoThis software wasn't. The number one requirement was 100%, or near 100%, uptime. The longer it operated the more money you made. Certain scripts could be guaranteed only a ~6 hour uptime, and required a manual restart which did not scale well to multiple instances. But yeah, in general thats absolutely true.