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We re-released the product to this group. It consisted of 10% of Rick’s original code which was pretty stable. It also had a few thousand lines of new code to r

We re-released the product to this group. It consisted of 10% of Rick’s original code which was pretty stable. It also had a few thousand lines of new code to replace about 150,000 lines of incomprehensible mess. The team had replaced five years of work in about six months. Over the next few months we expanded from pilot to full customer release. Up next: Manager on Medium bragging that he or she would be able to type out all ~1 000 000 words in the Harry Potter series in a couple hundred hours.

user5994461 9y ago
A team of 3 people for 6 months is a total of 3000 hours*men. They can do a lot.
Angostura 9y ago
Actually, I'm pretty sure what happened next was a dozen influential customers enquiring where those multiple weird little edge-case features that they relied on had gone in in the new, seemingly "dumbed down" release - the features that they had explicitly requested two years ago, which Sales had promised to get the sale, and which Rick had implemented in a bit of a hurry, noting that it would need to be refactored later.
talmand 9y ago
I'm curious how they managed to refactor about 150,000 lines of code down to a few thousand lines.
- x1798DE 9y ago
  Could be they slashed a bunch of features, but I wouldn't be surprised if they replaced a bunch of homebrewed frameworks with third party equivalents. "Line count" is such a vague measure, it's easy to get counter-intuitive results.
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    I used to routinely achieve 10-to-1 code refactors, without losing any functionality, and have probably done a few 20-to-1's. 50-to-1 is not really unbelievable. It's amazing the kind of pointless verbosity and over-complication some programmers are capable of. Besides refactoring, there's also garbage cleanup. We've all seen instances of huge, 1000 line functions that do nothing because the result of their calculation was thrown away, or because it's never called in the first place.

user5994461 9y ago

A team of 3 people for 6 months is a total of 3000 hours*men. They can do a lot.

Angostura 9y ago

Actually, I'm pretty sure what happened next was a dozen influential customers enquiring where those multiple weird little edge-case features that they relied on had gone in in the new, seemingly "dumbed down" release - the features that they had explicitly requested two years ago, which Sales had promised to get the sale, and which Rick had implemented in a bit of a hurry, noting that it would need to be refactored later.

talmand 9y ago

I'm curious how they managed to refactor about 150,000 lines of code down to a few thousand lines.

x1798DE 9y ago
Could be they slashed a bunch of features, but I wouldn't be surprised if they replaced a bunch of homebrewed frameworks with third party equivalents. "Line count" is such a vague measure, it's easy to get counter-intuitive results.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  I used to routinely achieve 10-to-1 code refactors, without losing any functionality, and have probably done a few 20-to-1's. 50-to-1 is not really unbelievable. It's amazing the kind of pointless verbosity and over-complication some programmers are capable of. Besides refactoring, there's also garbage cleanup. We've all seen instances of huge, 1000 line functions that do nothing because the result of their calculation was thrown away, or because it's never called in the first place.