Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Developer hell

The one who knows would understand me veeery well.

I'm now working on the project which looks in the following way. It started to be developed 8 years ago. There were about 4 teams of long-term hired outsourcers and a couple of consultants sustaining that sh%t-code for these 8 years.

And now - just listen - the code looks the following way.
  • .Net 1.1 windows application, which has a tree on the left, and different panels showing up on the right, depending on the node selected in the tree.
  • Sometimes on the right .Net winforms components are shown. Sometimes, ASP.NET 1.1 pages within hosted browser (IE ActiveX) are shown.
  • There is a couple of situations, when inside that ASP.NET 1.1 pages shown within IE Activex shown within Windows Forms application, Visual Basic 6 ActiveX control gets up.
  • Haven't you lost the story thread yet?
  • And - the best one. Where do you think does that custom VB6 ActiveX take data? You'll never believe. From the ASP.NET 2.0 Web service, which is published on the same server where the ASP.NET 1.1 pages containing that VB6 ActiveX are published.
Have you ever thought this is possible.
And - the last.

Users of this system were completely satisfied with this state for almost 2 years, and only after that lifetime system started to slow down...

Would you like such a job? :D

4 comments:

Alexander said...

And one more thing - I'm running and debugging this in the desktop sharing (logmein.com) in the activeX in the Interet Explorer page in the Windows XP running virtualized in the VirtualBox VM program under ubuntu.

I think: crazy I am.

Dmytrii said...

If clients were happy with the system, it did its job.
Maybe devs kept in mind such architecture just to be able to scale the application later or something similiar.
Otherwise I don't know what such complexity had been introduced for.

You can't believe how many crappy systems there are that just do the job, but have millions of bugs, problems, errors, security issues.

They are probably beeing developed for us to fix it :)

Post Scriptum said...

he who plays pays...

such matters souldn't bother you until you collect your paycheck ;)

Alexander said...

I understand, that in general - yes, in general - presence of such a system means that developers aren't going to be left without job.

But personally for me - no. I don't like be one of the happy :)

Maybe just because I've never lost job before.