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This reminds me of a Burning Code celebration my team once had at ocean beach in SF. We'd been slowly migrating from Angular 1.X to React (internally: the Angu
by fishtoaster 6y ago
This reminds me of a Burning Code celebration my team once had at ocean beach in SF.
We'd been slowly migrating from Angular 1.X to React (internally: the Angularpocalypse) for a few years and we'd finally migrated over our last few pages. The result was about 100k lines of JS and Rails code that could be safely deleted in a single PR. It had been such a long slog, though, that we felt the team deserved some catharsis.
We took a team-offsite day to gather on a nearby beach and burn the deleted code. In the interest of not wasting that much paper, we burnt a complete list of the deleted files in super-tiny font on a couple pages. We also each grabbed our least-favorite areas of the codebase to print out, including several dramatic readings. My selection was a section of code from about 4 years prior with a comment like //TODO: replace this asap.
I highly recommend it to anyone facing a long, clearly-delineated migration. Gift your old, shameful code to the flame.
- thedanbob 6y agoThis reminds me of one time when I finally got to shut down a particularly hated internal web app. For a few hours before the PHP server was taken offline, visiting the site would only return this image: https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6OWKZqvvPh8/UjBJ6xPxwjI/AAAAAAAAOv4/PNw87jBmeL0/s1600/ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead-5.png https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6OWKZqvvPh8/UjBJ6xPxwjI/AAAAAAAAO...
- justin_oaks 6y agoThat's awesome. What made the app so hated?
- pixl97 6y agoI'm going to make an assumption that it was a PHP app written internally by people that didn't know what they were doing, with no documentation, and that was fragile as all hell. Also probably written in some ancient php version that could not be upgraded and was a huge security risk. At least that's what I tend to see in the field.
- thedanbob 6y agoCheck, check, and check. Add to that no version control, no tests, no development environment, a custom ajax frontend framework, and the fact that it was mission critical. About the only thing it had going for it was daily database backups (which came in handy). I did my best to clean up the code so it was at least somewhat maintainable, but there were sections (the most important ones, of course) that I just wouldn't touch because it was impossible to tell what they did -- oh yeah, I forgot to mention the global variables, didn't I? So happy that app is dead and buried.
- tclancy 6y agoThat is some Silkwood Shower shit.
- Moru 6y agoWe had a similar situation but with an ASP application that got rewritten from scratch in PHP instead. It's still running fine after 10 years without any big bugs. We didn't even get access to the sourcecode so it was all new bugs instead but at least it wasn't a big security hole whose database got wiped every week because of Bobby Tables. It had daily backups though that came in handy every week :-)
- tehbeard 6y agoWe have a support contract for an app like that... On the bright side, using it to learn refactoring and migration techniques.
- jmnicolas 6y agoI have one like that. It was written by interns. One day I swear I will be able to get rid of it!
- BolexNOLA 6y agoBrilliant
- markdown 6y agoEvery since The Crown S4, I've lots of references flying around. I must say that she was superbly played by Gillian Anderson.
- webmaven 6y ago> Every since The Crown S4, I've lots of references flying around. I must say that she was superbly played by Gillian Anderson. Whut? That seems a complete non sequitur, am I missing something, or are you replying to the wrong thread?
- AndrewDucker 6y agoWhen Margaret Thatcher died there was a push to get that song to the top of the charts. It entered at #2
- webmaven 6y agoThank you for explaining. The chain of associations here was a bit longer than usual: Image Meme > Song Title > Prominent Death > Political Figure > Recent Dramatization > Actor in Role That's about as complex as your average bilingual pun!
- 8ytecoder 6y agoWe made a cake and stabbed it to death and then ate it.
- colordrops 6y agoHave you started on the Reactocalypse effort yet?
- hajhatten 6y agoEverything needs to be rewritten in phoenix live view now.
- jamil7 6y agoNo no no it's all about Svelte now /s
- rvense 6y agoI have to say, Phoenix Liveview is one of the most exciting things to me, although it's not a match for what I'm working on right now. But my previous job it would have been a perfect fit (a big SPA for monitoring a bunch of IoT devices that had web socket connections to a backend). We were two frontenders and two backenders and we spent so much time implementing and maintaining, not to mention _arguing_ over the API between the SPA and the backend, and that API would've basically gone away if we'd used Phoenix Live. I really hope to get to use it at some point.
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- quickthrower2 6y agoI think this sort of thing, while cheesy in some respects is great for the team morale. A lot of companies do social things, which is great, but they are disconnected from the work. It's like stop work, do something social, and back to work. But with this ritual it's connected and a real celebration. I hope React is better for you and you don't need to burn again in 5 years! Luckily hooks and non-hooks code works together nicely enough.
- eru 6y agoEmployees of the Chinese company Hayer famously smashed really dodgy and low quality fridges their company had produced in the 1980s as the symbolic start to a new dedication to quality. See https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/cnainsider/how-china-fridge-factory-haier-prevailed-over-general-electric-10861934 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/cnainsider/how-china-fr... for one write-up. > Teetering on the brink of collapse, the collective enterprise had gone through three managing directors in 1984 when Mr Zhang, a 35-year-old city manager, was appointed as the fourth. > No one expected much of him, since a revolving door of directors had failed to stop the rot. He put it thus: > People didn’t have faith in the factory. > But he grabbed the national headlines a year later, upon discovering from a check on the inventory that a fifth of the fridges were faulty. > Each fridge was worth two years of a worker’s pay, but Mr Zhang ordered the workers to destroy those 76 fridges – with a sledgehammer. The CEO joined in the smashing as well for extra symbolism.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- will_pseudonym 6y agoLove the story. The company is spelled "Haier" by the way, if you are interested in reading more about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haier
- skrebbel 6y agoWhich itself is a bad Latin transliteration of the second half of a bad Chinese transliteration of the German brand name "Liebherr", so I think they'll forgive the misspelling.
- sethammons 6y agoWe’ve done code burnings before. Throughout the year, any tech debt fixed or code repos removed could be printed out and burned in a bon fire at an annual gathering. Burning old chef code that made life pain every day? Put a smile on many faces haha.
- robbyking 6y agoI'm curious, how many people got the reference to the first Burning Man, held on Ocean Beach in 1986?
- mbertschler 6y agoWhen my team at a previous company finished a multi month migration of a large PHP app to the cloud we held a large deploy party where everyone gathered in a room and the CEO pressed a space bar labeled DEPLOY. A script ran, the load balancer config was upgraded and the whole team cheered for something ungraspable like this website in the cloud.
- fouc 6y agoI think it'd be hard for me to identify my "least favorite" area of codebase because I don't tend to get overly emotional about code. If I did get emotional it'd only be due to some sort of bikeshedding (style complaints) that I would have forgotten about by the next morning anyways.
- therealx 6y agoCongrats, robot human. Rejoice! You may exempt yourself from this extracorricular activity!
- a3n 6y ago> In the interest of not wasting that much paper, we burnt a complete list of the deleted files in super-tiny font on a couple pages. Pretty cool. Did anyone beat the printer to death with a baseball bat?
- AnonC 6y agoI got your (Office Space) reference, but I’m thinking that beating older keyboards, mice and monitors to death may be more appropriate in this instance. Those monsters facilitated the creation of the code. They should die with the code.
- Chris2048 6y agoI heard of a team that did a similar thing; Their app had some Norse name (something like Ragnarok or Valhalla etc) so the put it on an RC boat and torched it on a lake :-)
- thatdetroitandy 6y agoPretty similar! Fire and catharsis go hand in hand.