Now I've put it in perspective, I went on to an intern position between years 2 and 3 of uni. I was handed a lovely piece of code which had:
- Around 300 classes - 3 or 4 layers of nested generics - Factories, factory factories, generator factory factories - 90% of the parameters were passed in from the build engine running the code, so it was impossible to run locally, ever. - 0 tests - Some 100 pages of documentation, which had been lost until I was about halfway through my placement (and mostly documented how to set up and run it, not how to maintain it)
Seriously, this thing was designed to the extreme, made to be generic to every single scenario in existence.
So what did it do? It took items from a customer facing system, transferred it onto the internal work tracking system. Then when they were updated in the modern system, mirrored the relevant updates back to the legacy.
The best part? Every time the internal work tracking system updated (once every 6 months), this thing broke horribly and it was practically impossible to fix. Even if you managed to set up stuff so you could work in a development environment, it still connected to the customer facing system, so you had to be incredibly careful what you did during testing.
It wasn't the biggest in terms of LOC, but it astounded me just how much effort (apparently the guy who wrote it squirreled away for a year to write it, then moved to Canada, and was famous in the department for having one too many beers during a outing to a local Indian) went into designing this behemoth.
I still have the occasional nightmare about it!