10 ms·

That is essentially what I was hired out of school to do. I walked into a massive heap of ASP.NET (with VB) and MSSQL stored procedures that didn't really work

That is essentially what I was hired out of school to do. I walked into a massive heap of ASP.NET (with VB) and MSSQL stored procedures that didn't really work at all, and had been through the wringer of a few cut-rate outsourcing groups. I struggled along with it for a few months figuring out how it was supposed to work and trying to duck-tape it together, doing a lot of support with customers that were trying to use it, and talking to them about what they were trying to do. Then eventually I decided I wanted to learn some newer tech, so I started playing with Linq-to-SQL and ASP.NET MVC and Razor and Bootstrap, and over the course of three or four weekends and evenings I did a ground-up rewrite of the whole thing for fun. After a a bit more time flailing away with the old mess, I showed my side-version of it off to my boss, and it wasn't that hard a sell, being much prettier and less buggy. It helped that there was nobody around who was invested in the old code base. Generally, I've found it is a lot easier to effect this kind of change if you just do it stealthily and present it as a fait-accompli, because otherwise people get so bogged down in debate and fear that any impetus to actually take a risk and do something evaporates.

kamarg 8y ago
I'm doing something similar for a project I inherited from an outsourced company. Did you end up just giving it to your employer? Did you ask for compensation for all the non-work time you spent building it?
- thrower123 8y ago
  I was 23 and had a lot of time on my hands, and I was learning stuff and getting away from having to be on endless support calls with that gawdawful mess that I replaced. It was a pretty good trade, all things considered - I think I got a 15k raise that year, and built a lot of trust that I could do good work independently without a lot of oversight. On balance, I think I've been more than compensated for that time since then.
meddlepal 8y ago
The problem with going this route is you have to sacrifice personal time for it. Now in your case you taught yourself something new, but that's not always going to work. I do agree with your assessment that it is much easier to drop a working thing in people's laps and get buy-in than ask for permission. This is also what causes pork barrelling in projects.
ams6110 8y ago
If you can rewrite it in 3 or 4 weekends, it's really not that complicated. Either that or significant chunks of it were retained and your improvements were mostly cosmetic.
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  Or, they are actually good at their craft and rewrote it. That's not an unreasonable timeline. Taking code that does something and writing another version in another design pattern is much, much faster than starting from scratch. Even with complicated code (especially with complicated code)
- thrower123 8y ago
  It really wasn't very complicated... basically just some queries to search a database and a front-end to display results. I still don't know how the preceding mess got to the point of being such a baroque cobbled-together monstrosity, but it was enough copy-pasta to keep an Olive Garden supplied for a year, and a raft of incomprehensible stored procedures that did SELECT * FROM table WHERE xyz in bizarrely complicated ways involving multiple casts and nested temp results.
- flukus 8y ago
  I've worked on similar projects that could have been re-written relatively quickly but were only complicated because the developers made it complicated. Some devs just want to solve hard problems in "elegant" ways and will throw in elaborate inheritance chains, meta-programming, code generation, service oriented architectures, layers upon layers, frameworks, rules engines and anything else that's not boring business logic. IME these projects are usually more complicated than all but the most wild of business logic.

kamarg 8y ago

I'm doing something similar for a project I inherited from an outsourced company. Did you end up just giving it to your employer? Did you ask for compensation for all the non-work time you spent building it?

thrower123 8y ago
I was 23 and had a lot of time on my hands, and I was learning stuff and getting away from having to be on endless support calls with that gawdawful mess that I replaced. It was a pretty good trade, all things considered - I think I got a 15k raise that year, and built a lot of trust that I could do good work independently without a lot of oversight. On balance, I think I've been more than compensated for that time since then.

meddlepal 8y ago

The problem with going this route is you have to sacrifice personal time for it. Now in your case you taught yourself something new, but that's not always going to work. I do agree with your assessment that it is much easier to drop a working thing in people's laps and get buy-in than ask for permission. This is also what causes pork barrelling in projects.

ams6110 8y ago

If you can rewrite it in 3 or 4 weekends, it's really not that complicated. Either that or significant chunks of it were retained and your improvements were mostly cosmetic.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago
Or, they are actually good at their craft and rewrote it. That's not an unreasonable timeline. Taking code that does something and writing another version in another design pattern is much, much faster than starting from scratch. Even with complicated code (especially with complicated code)
thrower123 8y ago
It really wasn't very complicated... basically just some queries to search a database and a front-end to display results. I still don't know how the preceding mess got to the point of being such a baroque cobbled-together monstrosity, but it was enough copy-pasta to keep an Olive Garden supplied for a year, and a raft of incomprehensible stored procedures that did SELECT * FROM table WHERE xyz in bizarrely complicated ways involving multiple casts and nested temp results.
flukus 8y ago
I've worked on similar projects that could have been re-written relatively quickly but were only complicated because the developers made it complicated. Some devs just want to solve hard problems in "elegant" ways and will throw in elaborate inheritance chains, meta-programming, code generation, service oriented architectures, layers upon layers, frameworks, rules engines and anything else that's not boring business logic. IME these projects are usually more complicated than all but the most wild of business logic.