Mostly Betterer

I had mentioned before how after we fired that programmer a few weeks ago I had been assigned to finish up the project he was working on. Unfortunately for me this involved mostly reverse engineering his work, since he apparently didn’t believe in useful comments let alone design documentation. I have been cranking on this for quite awhile now, and all along feeling worse and worse about this guy’s design (or at least what I was figuring out about it).

My boss, Pedro, had given me a few restrictions to my work too… I had to try very hard to keep all the modifications local to the Javascript code (so we didn’t have to ship a new version to users), which sucks because A) I don’t like Javascript, B) It is really slow, especially when walking the DOM, and 3) Javascript is really hard to debug. I worked on this for quite awhile before I called abort on it and told him that I really needed to make binary modifications in order for it to work right. So I worked on that for a few days, presuming that since we now moved into “new point release” land that we would simply hold this feature until the next release (which will probably be before Spring Semester). Apparently he disagreed, which I found out yesterday… We talked about this whole thing with the rest of the engineering team in yesterday’s meeting… Pedro finally asked everyone who thought we should try to make what we have work versus starting over again, and all of us voted for redesigning (or arguably, designing it the first time) from scratch. I respect him for being willing to listen to us, and for being willing to throw out work that cost him a lot of money (both in our former employee and my salvage time).

I really love my job, even when I am working on something shitty…. :)

Now I get to play with XUL!