If you are human and you've written something and are reasonably intelligent - say somewhere between a door stop and Fox News Anchor, chances are good that if you come back to whatever it was that you wrote after a bit of time, you are going to see things that could be improved or written differently. Those that fail the reasonably intelligent bit think their shit is golden and keep making the same damn mistakes. If you are writing novels or editorials or blogs, the impact of your poor writing is probably negligible. But, if you are writing code and scripts and doing tasks that other people's code and scripts are based on, as the Ski Instructor says...You are gonna have a bad time. The mishmash of half-assed code and fucktard scripts snowballs into a leviathan of suck. It is an epic undertaking to unfuck the fuckeduppedness.
All of the places I have written code for, yeah, both of them, have been somewhere in the midst of gosh we have done some shitty things and we really need to do things in a sane way...maybe follow some best practices and not consult the magic eight ball or other eight ball before making crucial architectural decisions or implementing some homegrown, inbred, failed abortion of a thing with Patrick Duffy for a leg and a celery hand. Goddamn it - unraveling this FSM-looking colossal mess will test your testicular or ovarian fortitude. You better wear a cup. Servers may crash, skies may fall - rest assured tears will be shed. Suck it up and forge ahead.
There is an old proverb (Mongolian maybe) that states: No matter how far down the wrong road you go, turn back. This definitely applies to technology and diabeetus - depending where you are on 435 in KC or 270 in STL it might by shorter to keep going.
So, after years of being told, get it done, of changing code during a deploy - not right before a deploy, but during a goddamn deploy, of we'll come back to documentation at a later date, of he who screams the loudest gets his feature added, we are attempting to put in structure and do things sanely. Let's test our shit before we deploy it. Wat? Document your inputs and outputs - make it easier for someone to code against your stuff. Da fuq?
Being the only database and sql dude on the app side, I was forgotten or picked last. I had heard some bitching from the full on coders about having to write tests for something that has worked for years when there are other things breaking and new fun shit to do and thought, "hahaha - fuck you, cry about it you baby girl" *in my best Vince Vaughn* - well this baby girl is crying about it now - jokes on me. I had a 7 second change to a stored procedure - literally 7 seconds - not literally almost about 7 seconds - well, no, really more 10-ish - fucking 7 Mississippi's and I was done with the code change. It took me days to figure out all of the inputs and how to appropriately build out the data picture "because you cannot assume the data exists - you have to create it and then clean up after yourself" and our system is pretty fucked up. If there was a God and he was a heroin addict with Schizophrenia, Priapism, Parkinson's and Tourette's - not to mention a spastic colon - He could not eat tainted sushi from a sidewalk vendor and shit something worse that this. Or maybe I am just a little bitter.
This process is going to make you want to shoot some people or at least pistol whip them. The sad truth is that most of the time, you had a hand in creating this candidate for a really really late term abortion. You may want to pistol whip yourself, as well. Don't waste time doing that however because there is a mountain of work ahead of you. It is going to suck. It is going to drain your soul and make you question your choice in profession. I have been thinking about how I used to tend bar. I was pretty goddamn good at it too. Bars are fun. Sometimes you can drink. Sometimes a girl will go wild and that's always fun. When my eyes are crossing and I am cussing my mother for not swallowing me instead, I consider going back to that life. Not one single person has come back to the bar after I made them a drink and asked me to rollback. That sounds pretty good. But then I remember the bad parts of it, getting shot at, tires slashed, ass kicked in monolithic brawl, having to socialize with mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers and scumbag Steve's as far as the eye can see. Fuck that. Benefits are nice too. Paid holidays and occasional free pizza make me happy. I could use a nice pair of tittays once in a while though. I'll have to settle for CTRL-SHIFT-N.
Anyway, virtually nobody does it right the first time. You have to pay your dues. Things that are difficult to accomplish make you feel like a fucking badass when you triumph over them. And fuck it, it all pays the same. But, someday - some fine day - you will be sitting atop the Everest of code done the right way. Shit actually works as expected. Changes that fix one thing but break something else are caught quicker than Mexican food through a goose. You can install things like Chaos Monkey and break shit without impacting user and losing money. And ultimately, your end-users are served better, quality is high, output is fast, everyone gets raises and you get to live the good life. Or at least that's what these motherfuckers keep telling me. Maybe I'll get there one day. Maybe I'll see the bright shining lights of Utopia. But for now, its all asses and elbows and "who in their right fucking mind would think that inserting values without checking them is a good idea?" and "step away from the firearm, sir."
In closing, I feel like I just brain-skeeted all over this page but catharsis is good for me but potentially puzzling for you Dear Reader. Console yourself with the fact that "We lib a fyt anuda day". I'm off to drink some Gatorade, or maybe H2O. Toodles.
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