working late
Feb. 8th, 2006 08:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorrowmonkeyOkay, we got yet another change request today for this system which we've been working on since last November, and is scheduled to roll out to production on Friday of next week. The change is relatively minor, having to do with the labels used for the dates in the data warehouse. This seems like a reasonable straight-forward change.
The devil, of course, is in the details.
This horrible POS code is a spaghetti-mess of cut-and-paste repeated sections, which is only slightly different for each iteration. Basically, it is heavily optimized for time, and not at all optimized for space. Data warehouses tend towards this, since small improvements on a per-row basis yield massive overall performance.
However, the nifty little bit here is that we have huge other repeated sections of code that TRIGGER on these labels. I have to make the same 17 changes in 9 different locations. Also, I found an error in all 9 locations which I will need to fix later.
In short, I hate this code, the data, the project, the client, and the idiot programmer who wrote this.
Unfortunately, it is code that I wrote and felt pretty good about four months ago. Damn.
The devil, of course, is in the details.
This horrible POS code is a spaghetti-mess of cut-and-paste repeated sections, which is only slightly different for each iteration. Basically, it is heavily optimized for time, and not at all optimized for space. Data warehouses tend towards this, since small improvements on a per-row basis yield massive overall performance.
However, the nifty little bit here is that we have huge other repeated sections of code that TRIGGER on these labels. I have to make the same 17 changes in 9 different locations. Also, I found an error in all 9 locations which I will need to fix later.
In short, I hate this code, the data, the project, the client, and the idiot programmer who wrote this.
Unfortunately, it is code that I wrote and felt pretty good about four months ago. Damn.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-02-09 04:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-09 12:24 pm (UTC)You could, start adding weird comments to each repeated section to mark them as unique.
Then you'd have the '//bite me' section; the '//seagullls go dancing' section; etc.
And someday, some dev down the road will loose thier mind trying to guess what the bloody hell you were doing.