These notes were recovered from a shared drive, in a folder named “DO NOT TOUCH (old)”. They were written by a developer sent to “just have a quick look” at the billing module. He is still looking.
Day 1
Entered the codebase at 09:00. Morale high. Coffee warm. First file is 11,000 lines long. It is called utils.js. Nothing in it is a utility. Some of it appears to be a confession.
Found a function named doStuff2_FINAL_real. There is no doStuff1. There is no doStuff2_FINAL. There is only this. It survived.
Day 2
Discovered a comment: “TODO: fix this before launch”. The launch was in 2009. The person who wrote it now runs a pottery studio and is, by every measure, happier than me. I checked.
Located a variable called x2. It stores the customer’s postcode. Nobody knows why. Renaming it crashes the login page, in a completely different system.
Legacy code is code that works for reasons nobody understands, written by someone who has wisely fled to make mugs.
Day 3
The tests. There are three. One tests that true equals true. It passes. It is the only thing here that does. The other two are commented out: “flaky, will fix”. They will not be fixed. They are flaky the way a cliff edge is flaky.
Day 4
Found the heart of the system. A single if-statement, nested 14 levels deep, that controls payroll, invoices and the office heating. A comment above it reads: “Don’t.” Just that. Whoever wrote it knew. Whoever wrote it left.
Day 5
Ran git blame on the worst line. It was me. 2017. I have no memory of it. I do not recognise the man who wrote it. He was confident. He had hair. He used tabs.
Day 6
Recommended a full rewrite. Management said there is no budget. There was budget for the offsite. I have been asked to add a new feature to the if-statement instead. I am adding it at level 15. Above it, I have written a comment for whoever comes next. It says: “Sorry. Run.”