{"id":3185,"date":"2019-01-14T09:52:40","date_gmt":"2019-01-14T15:52:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=3185"},"modified":"2018-12-01T06:41:46","modified_gmt":"2018-12-01T12:41:46","slug":"ever-felt-like-your-codebase-was-out-of-control","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/3185","title":{"rendered":"Ever felt like your codebase was out of control?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I certainly have. A couple of times in my career the combination of technical debt, business model shift and lack of time for a proper fix have left me feeling out of control.<\/p>\n

But reading this post on Hacker News<\/a> made me realize that it all could have been so so much worse. A couple of “best ofs”:<\/p>\n

To give you some examples, I originally came on as a contractor because they had some refactoring they wanted done. The entire system was home built (including the programming language) and there was a file size limit of 32,767 lines. They had many functions<\/i> that were approaching this limit and they didn’t know what to do, so they hired me. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and:<\/p>\n

Once upon a time, there was a search product and one of the data sources that it could search was a Solr\/Lucene database. This should be no problem, since search is what Solr does. It should be as simple as passing the user’s query through to Solr and then reading the response. The problem was, it was important to know exactly which parts of any matched records were relevant to the search.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Guy Before Me\u2122 decided that the best way to implement this would be to split the user’s search into individual words, perform a separate<\/i> search query through Solr’s HTTP API for each individual<\/i> word, and then do a bunch of very clever and complex post-processing on the result sets to combine them into a single set of results.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and (last one, I promise):<\/p>\n

At my first gig I teamed up with a guy responsible for a gigantic monolith written in Lua. Originally, the project started as a little script running in Nginx. Over the course of several years, it organically grew to epic proportions, by consuming and replacing every piece of software that it interfaced with – including Nginx.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There were two ingredients in the recipe for disaster. The first is that Lua comes “batteries excluded”: the standard library is minimalist and the community and set of available packages out there is small. That’s typically not an issue, as long as one uses Lua in the intended way: small scripts that extend existing programs with custom user logic (e.g. Nginx, Vim, World of Warcraft). The second is that Lua is a dynamic language: it’s dynamically typed, and practically everything can be overridden, monkey patched and hacked, down to the fundamental iterators that allow you to traverse data structures.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

shivers<\/em>. There, but for the grace of God.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I certainly have. A couple of times in my career the combination of technical debt, business model shift and lack of time for a proper fix have left me feeling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming","category-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3185"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3187,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3185\/revisions\/3187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}