Oct 17, 2013 Posted by John MacIntyre

I’m a good dev

2 recent experiences Earlier this year I had 2 experiences which made me pause & reflect: The first was an outsourcing company’s framework from hell.  The framework was made to make MVC work like webforms … I kid you not.  I suspect they had a webforms framework and were trying to hold on to their previous productivity gains by jamming their square peg into the MVC paradigm’s round hole.  The end result was an undocumented, inconsistent, buggy mess that only an experienced developer can figure out; ironically it’s the kind of mess an experienced developer would know enough to stay away from.  (Although I didn’t) Fine.  Whatever.  We all make mistakes right? But I did find the video on their website talking about how “good high quality code” “pays dividends down the road when you’re trying to add features” and how it “enables you to have high performance applications” a little nauseating, especially while fixing errors around Sql Server’s 2,100 parameter limitation.  Turns out they were querying ids matching their filter, passing the results back to .NET, and then passing those ids back into a second query.  There was a bunch of rookie mistakes like that which hardly enabled ‘high performance applications’. The second was when a friend asked me to add OSCommerce to his brand new brochure website.  No problem, but I was shocked that the guy who wrote the brochure website (this year … in 2013) did it in Classic ASP.  .. wait. wuht?  Yes, somebody wrote a brand new app in a technology which was obsoleted in 2001.  Don’t get me wrong, if they did this in 2001, 2002, or even 2003 because they didn’t want to work in the ‘untested’ new .net technology, I would understand, I’m rather risk adverse myself. … but it’s been 12 years. I think we’re ok. Since they were moving to OSCommerce which is written in PHP, their ability to find hosting which has both PHP and Classic ASP might be limited, and it would be so easy to port a Classic ASP brochure site to PHP, I just ported it.  The original Classic ASP code was good code, it was clean, easy to read, and used appropriate best practices … but how good is your code when it’s obsolete 12 years before it’s written?  Well from what I hear, the original developer didn’t think my decision to move to PHP was a great idea and questioned my competence. I’m... read more