I was the first developer in my company. 5 years and 10 developers later...

ismelldeath · 9 months

5 years? It only take me a few months of not looking at a project before I go blank.

fastredb · 9 months

Scumbag Programmer

"What was the idiot who wrote this shitty comment thinking?"

\suddenly notices own initials at end of comment**

ScribbleJ · 9 months

This is the single most relateable post I have ever read on Reddit.

phuckHipsters · 9 months

The second 10 developers at my company were hired to clean up the mess of the first 5.

The third 15 were hired on account of the second 10.

But the first 5 are constantly lamenting what happened to their beautiful code because of all of these cut-rate programmers that keep flooding the office.

It's a vicious and beautiful cycle.

bearachute · 9 months

I get this way every time I look at one line of regex. I could have written it myself 5 minutes ago.

jidar · 9 months

I JUST went through this a minute before I saw this post.

It went like this:

Get a phone call: "Hey I just got an error message doing X and it said to call jidar."

Me: Ummm... doing X? I have no idea about that.

phoneguy: Well it said to call you, here look.

Me: Okay I'll check it out and call you back.

Sure enough its one of my error messages and I somewhat vaguely recall working on it, only thing is the date on the source is 2003 and it's crap. Man I sucked back then.

Rival67 · 9 months

I know, it's disturbing! Especially after you run svn blame and you're the coder.

oceansize · 9 months

Yep. Ye speak the truth. I work at a small but very active development firm, i.e. there are two developers, and we produce about 5 small to medium sized LOB apps a year. Now, times that by the 12 years I have been here and that is a shit ton of code. To compound the issue is that me an the other guy write stuff in what we feel is the best tool for the job. However, that means on a daily basis I could be writing c,c++,java,c#,javascript, xsl, tsql,pl/sql,pgsql,sql,python, or numerous other scripting languages. I look at crap almost daily and think there is no effing way I wrote this cause I don't remember didly, and then there are my initials and a date. Everyday is like a massive xmas regift around here.

fisch003 · 9 months

I get that feeling when I try and catch up on an open source project I once contributed to. Yikes.

[deleted] · 9 months

It's a good feeling when you're about to start a project and someone reminds you that you wrote it months ago. Then you open it up to see how it looks and it makes you cringe. I still refuse to believe that some of those functions are written by me.

aoeui-dhtns · 9 months

"Ah! It's this way." (follows best-documented code.) "When in doubt, always follow your nose."

waffleninja · 9 months

More like 2 weeks and 0 developers later.

palordrolap · 9 months

Existence is very Zen. Zen is not Zen. You are not you. We are not ourselves.

We are each of us a Ship of Theseus and our state of mind reflects that fact.

Every time you want to kick your past self in the seat of the pants for incomprehensible coding decisions, and equally, every time you praise yourself (your past self) as a genius for a particularly spectacular piece of ingenuity, just remember. You're not the you who did that. You are someone else now.

doctechnical · 9 months

Welcome to the world of "Senior Moments".

You'll get used to it.

Alistracious · 9 months

Whelp, this solidifies it.

The latest meme.

TheGazelle · 9 months

I find this to be one of the most humbling experiences as a coder, when even you have no idea what in the hell you were thinking when you wrote that code..

Kinda works as an automatic ego deflater.

jutct · 9 months

I just started consulting again for a company I left in 2004. I can't believe how much of my code is still the majority of the projects. It's like me seeing younger me again. And it's pretty good code.

daniel021 · 9 months

Im not a professional but i looked at some of my first works in PHP from a few years ago which was a tournament website.

I didnt know what OOP was or how to use loops and i didnt separate PHP from html (all html was echoed).

the script for just displaying/updating the tournament results from database was IIRC 1800+ lines of code and i tried to redo it a while back and made the entire thing in ~100 lines including the html and shit.

Now im moving on from Zend onto pyramid for some awesome python instead of PHP which i secretly despise.

I'm betting the classes and stuff im writing now in python will make me hate myself in the next few months :)

ISS5731 · 9 months

I am not a programmer by any means but I can tell you this:

Always leave comments.

Nadrik · 9 months

Sounds like a good company.

spagnitz · 9 months

that's why you use comments

JabberJauw · 9 months

I was the first developer in my company too :), but then i took an arrow to the knee. Sorry i had to do it

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