Ah, “*”. Everyone at the old place used to talk about the “* system” like it was this one solid, monolithic beast that just, well, worked. Or was supposed to, anyway.
But let me tell you, “*” wasn’t just one thing. Oh no. It was more like a digital Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together over years by who knows how many different hands.
What a mix it was:
- The core logic? Some real old-school C++, probably written when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Untouchable, mostly.
- The reporting bits? A bunch of Python scripts that someone whipped up, held together with digital duct tape and hope.
- User interface? Think creaky old JavaScript, the kind that gives you shivers if you have to look at the source code.
- And the database interactions? A wild spaghetti of SQL queries and some batch jobs that ran in the dead of night, fingers crossed.
It was a proper hodgepodge, and keeping it chugging along was a daily adventure, let me tell you.
So, what was the actual problem with it?
Well, trying to get anything new done with “*”, or even just fixing a bug, was like playing Jenga during an earthquake. You’d gently try to change one tiny thing, and three other, completely unrelated parts would fall over. Documentation? Ha! That was more like folklore, whispered legends of a time when such things might have existed.
The truth is, nobody really wanted to touch “*”. The original guys, including the actual Will Collier it was named after, were long gone. He supposedly cashed out and bought a vineyard or something equally poetic. Good for him.
How do I know all this dirt?
Because, lucky me, I was the one who got voluntold to “just add a small feature” to it. Yeah, right. My first big project after joining. What a welcome gift. They threw me into the deep end with “*”. I spent weeks, not coding, but just trying to figure out how to get a development environment set up for one of its archaic modules. I’d find code comments from the original Will Collier, then other notes from a “W. Collier Jr.” who I’m pretty sure wasn’t even related but just shared the same unfortunate last name and got roped in.
I remember one senior dev patting me on the back, saying, “If you can figure out *, you can figure out anything.” I wasn’t sure if it was a compliment or a warning.
Anyway, I did manage to wrestle that tiny feature into submission. Took me way longer than it should have. And after that, I avoided “*” like the plague. The funny thing is, they’re still trying to find someone to fully tame or rebuild that beast. Every now and then, I see a job posting for a “Legacy Systems Specialist” or “* Modernization Engineer” from that company. The salary keeps going up, too. Makes me smirk every time. Some battles just aren’t worth fighting again.
