Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?

#91

Post by maxxxxx » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 9:28 PM UTC

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #64

kokokokoko wrote: post #62

I would be careful with some of the responses here. Over my career I've found that a significant subset of developers struggle with unfamiliar codebases. Sometimes this has to do with their experience being mostly with greenfield projects and other times it is because they have not seen a wide array of different work created by other people. But sometimes it is good old fashioned workplace politics. It is risky to ta…

I don't know about you, but I've rarely worked on a codebase that _wasn't_ awful in some way, and I am definitely not early in my career. I've come to the conclusion that most programmers are simply awful at their jobs, and the developers that can write clear, concise code are a small minority. I've known a few, but not many.

Especially in big companies it's really hard to keep your code concise. I have often started with a very clean design that totally feel apart when new requirements came in. If you give managers the choice to hack it into the code in 1x time or redesign the code in 2x time most of them will vote for the first option. Go through that cycle a few times and your code will be a big mess

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?

#92

Post by x0hm » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 9:30 PM UTC

kjeetgill wrote: post #72

hackernews31242 wrote: post #10

I’m a consultant and make a living saving bad projects. That’s literally why I get phone calls for work. Keep in mind that I work in high level modern languages, I’m sure there’s some crazy proprietary cpu running a robot in a Detroit factory. In any case there’s never been something that I’ve run into that I’ve not figured out. It takes time, and the hard part usually is not figuring out what it does but the weird e…

Huh, I love working on a untangling and managing large old codebases. Mind sharing where your company or contacts?

Same - send us some info so we can do this too.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?

#93

Post by potta_coffee » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 9:31 PM UTC

lostgame wrote: post #87

potta_coffee wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you do if the codebase was actually 5 codebases absorbed from 5 different smaller companies? Assume that zero institutional knowledge about the code / business have been passed on.

>> Assume that zero institutional knowledge about the code / business have been passed on. Who is, in that case, using the software? They obviously understand the context by which the software is at least going to work, otherwise, why is the software being rewritten? Who is requesting the rewrite? Do they know what it is supposed to do? Is there an executable build of it that exists somewhere?

These are ecommerce systems. It's astonishing because no-one in the company truly has a complete understanding of the business, as far as I can tell. The code is running in production and serving customers.

Rewrite is being pushed by certain parties because we're unable to meet feature requests quickly with the existing system, and it's being assumed that a rewrite will fix that problem. The team is barely functional though (from the top down). I've seen a few failed projects now and I don't think the rewrite will ever be accomplished. If we manage to rewrite, it's far from certain that we'll do a better job than the last guys did.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?

#94

Post by potta_coffee » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 9:32 PM UTC

bap wrote: post #56

potta_coffee wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you do if the codebase was actually 5 codebases absorbed from 5 different smaller companies? Assume that zero institutional knowledge about the code / business have been passed on.

You are now in the platform business. I have to assume someone is using the software therefore there is some tribal knowledge of what it does? Otherwise this is maybe SAAS software that users use and some functionality is exposed that would allow you to begin decomposing backwards toward expected input/output. You're almost black-boxing at that point. I will admit that I have, on very rare occasion, scream tested a p…

There's a surface level understanding of what it does but nobody really understands how many of the large features really work, or what the actual rules are that govern them. Yes, much of this is black box. Example: yesterday I had to try to figure out what branch of code was compiled and deployed to our server. Everyone had assumed it was the Master branch, but no...deploying that branch fubared everything. I finally found the "working" branch of code.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?

#95

Post by maxxxxx » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 9:33 PM UTC

djstein wrote: post #67

kokokokoko wrote: post #62

I would be careful with some of the responses here. Over my career I've found that a significant subset of developers struggle with unfamiliar codebases. Sometimes this has to do with their experience being mostly with greenfield projects and other times it is because they have not seen a wide array of different work created by other people. But sometimes it is good old fashioned workplace politics. It is risky to ta…

> unfamiliar and less than ideal design patterns and coding practices. is this not what awful is?

With that attitude anything a few years old will be called "awful", especially the latest, best shiniest code you are writing today.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?

#96

Post by maxxxxx » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 9:35 PM UTC

hackernews31242 wrote: post #10

I’m a consultant and make a living saving bad projects. That’s literally why I get phone calls for work. Keep in mind that I work in high level modern languages, I’m sure there’s some crazy proprietary cpu running a robot in a Detroit factory. In any case there’s never been something that I’ve run into that I’ve not figured out. It takes time, and the hard part usually is not figuring out what it does but the weird e…

That sounds like something for me. I love optimizing and improving existing systems.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?

#97

Post by potta_coffee » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 9:36 PM UTC

bap wrote: post #56

potta_coffee wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you do if the codebase was actually 5 codebases absorbed from 5 different smaller companies? Assume that zero institutional knowledge about the code / business have been passed on.

You are now in the platform business. I have to assume someone is using the software therefore there is some tribal knowledge of what it does? Otherwise this is maybe SAAS software that users use and some functionality is exposed that would allow you to begin decomposing backwards toward expected input/output. You're almost black-boxing at that point. I will admit that I have, on very rare occasion, scream tested a p…

Part of the problem is that the people who owned tribal knowledge were all fired / quit without documenting anything. Every member of the existing team has been there around a year or less.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?

#98

Post by user5994461 » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 9:36 PM UTC

EpicEng wrote: post #52

I was hired for this exact reason at my last company and tasked with rewriting it while maintaining bit-for-bit identical output. The company itself was in biotech (cancer diagnostics) and was relatively new, spun off from a rather well known research lab. They quickly realized that their system was incapable of scaling (or being maintained properly...) to the needs of a business. The code itself was written primaril…

>>> That system was released (successfully) early this year. I began work on it nearly five years ago now, with many detours along the way. I now work elsewhere.

At what part of the project did you leave? I can't imagine anyone staying in the same company doing the same rewrite for 5 years.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?

#99

Post by EpicEng » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 9:42 PM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #98

EpicEng wrote: post #52

I was hired for this exact reason at my last company and tasked with rewriting it while maintaining bit-for-bit identical output. The company itself was in biotech (cancer diagnostics) and was relatively new, spun off from a rather well known research lab. They quickly realized that their system was incapable of scaling (or being maintained properly...) to the needs of a business. The code itself was written primaril…

>>> That system was released (successfully) early this year. I began work on it nearly five years ago now, with many detours along the way. I now work elsewhere. At what part of the project did you leave? I can't imagine anyone staying in the same company doing the same rewrite for 5 years.

I stayed until I finished it. It wasn't a rwrite anymore, only the application stayed the same, and even then we added a ton of functionality (e.g. morphological analysis as well as identification.) It's something I wanted to complete as I literally built huge parts of it by myself and wanted it to succeed. I took what I learned at the previous company and had a chance to build something similar from the ground up under my own (technical) direction. It was a bit of a pride thing.

Honestly, having worked in medical devices for more than a decade, a five year dev cycle isn't crazy. All said and done it was about three years of dev due to the aforementioned detours (shiny object chasing by management.)

In the beginning there were two other devs on the team, but they were web guys and primarily concerned with CRUD stuff. They were laid off and ~1 year later we hired three more, but again, primarily concerned with the web side and third party integrations. I was all hardware, image processing, image viewing, and image analysis, only helping them when needed. These images are multiple gigapixel (~20GB uncompressed), so just managing and viewing them is a lot of work.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?

#100

Post by orf » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 9:47 PM UTC

I know of a very popular London startup who's entire database is in Spanish due to the initial dev work being outsourced to a development company in Spain. All table, column, and procedure names are in Spanish. A refactor is too risky and they are growing too fast, so all the engineers have to pick up basic... programmer Spanish?

That's a more literal example of not being able to understand the codebase I guess.