There's a bunch of little scripts I've had to write for my workflow. Time is short so I've taken parts and pieces from experiments, treated them as black boxes,

There's a bunch of little scripts I've had to write for my workflow. Time is short so I've taken parts and pieces from experiments, treated them as black boxes, and wrote interfaces to make them handle way more than I ever anticipated. It usually looks bad and has little useful documentation for the heavy math inside but it works and will work for years. I try to spend time on making the interface clear and friendly for anyone else that uses it after me but the internals are a nest of wires and obtuse mechanisms that I can barely remember how they work. We had an excel spreadsheet that was used for at least a decade to process some measurements. There were a lot of magic numbers shoved in the equations to handle some issues with the equipment along with math that I'm surprised Excel can handle. The results would be correct but it was a total black box but the steps to get to them were nearly incomprehensible. A coworker decided to spend some time upgrading it to Matlab to allow for some better interfacing with new test equipment we were buying. She thought it would take a week, it took months. Talking to the original author was useless as he couldn't remember how he built any of it. Finally she got it working with both the old and new test equipment and now has properly documented everything so it explains the use of any magic numbers. I did not envy that job at all.