Popular posts

This exact incident has happened with me.

Our company once hired a contractor (let's call this person, "The Lord") for a platform (The platform itself had 4 web projects and 2 mobile projects, and The Lord was responsible for 2 web projects).

The Lord had some peculiar habits, (my then reporting manager then told me that The Lord has "different" take on coding solutions)

1. The Lord wouldn't push code. Because Version Control System is for mere mortals. The Lord shipped a flash drive. I was supposed to "push" The Lord's code to the company's repository using my credentials. (Basically the projects spills my name, every time something breaks.)

2. The Lord wouldn't complete tasks, Because completing tasks is for mere mortals, and freqently in the platform we'd notice some things not happening. When we dived into the code, we'd find

   // TODO
   // Task details: some thing is not going to happen
   // Please write xyz code to do the task
   

   This became so annoying, that I finally ended up searching for all //TODO ( // TODO, //To be done ) to fix it, once and for all.

3. The Lord believed in transparency. This is what the entire component structure of the web app looked like:

   <GrandParentComponent {...state}>
       <ParentComponent {...this.props}>
           <ChildComponent {...this.props}/>
       </ParentComponent>
   </GrandParentComponent>
   

   Basically the entire redux store was loaded on the parent most component, And ALL of the props were flushed down from parent to the child, all components knew how to do everything. To give you a perspective the logout button knew, how to logout, login, add user, delete user, add organization, remove organization, assign users to the organization, and maybe run rm -rf / on the server.

4. The Lord had strong gripes with inheritance. There was a component that was something like this:

   <SuperAwesomeReactComponent someEntity={someEntity} {...this.props} that={this}/>

   Not just the fact that someEntity was already nested inside this.props . The Child component had code segments from both the worlds: this.setState and that.setState.

Things I learnt from this experience:

1. Be honest with your seniors regarding this, I am lucky enough to have seniors who agreed that I was in some deep s#it. I clearly communicated with them, that it will take more than usual time for me to ship this, for I am a mere mortal.
2. DO NOT throw away code. Specially if the work done on the same can be measured in months. Try to rewrite some parts of it and make code more and more simpler for you (and potentially others).
3. Try to reuse, rearrange and retain existing code, to it's extreme extent. It will use the maximum amount of creativity in the way, you may not be enthused. (It's like using wrench to hammer nails down.)
4. K.T. (Knowledge Transfer) can sometimes be useless. In The Lord's hour long KT (on a weekend, when The Lord was busy with other commitments), in which The Lord spent 40 minutes on how code generated by boilerplate works.

I will keep updating as I get more thoughts.