Jimmy Miller

So yeah, it was a, it was a pretty, this is, this is honestly one of the things that like was so strange is it's the scale of the actual code base, the scale of like how many people are using this is small, but not completely trivial. And yet like this, this legacy code base, especially the other ones, the other applications that were like the big rewrites had not seen production use and

So yeah, it was a, it was a pretty, this is, this is honestly one of the things that like was so strange is it's the scale of the actual code base, the scale of like how many people are using this is small, but not completely trivial. And yet like this, this legacy code base, especially the other ones, the other applications that were like the big rewrites had not seen production use and

And we were able to, with me, an analyst, a QA, one senior developer, and four interns, we're able to out-compete all of this rewrite. We were adding new features, fixing old bugs, and doing all of that in this system. While they were off doing their big agile processes and doing all their story pointing and all of that and never getting anything done. So it was fun.

And we were able to, with me, an analyst, a QA, one senior developer, and four interns, we're able to out-compete all of this rewrite. We were adding new features, fixing old bugs, and doing all of that in this system. While they were off doing their big agile processes and doing all their story pointing and all of that and never getting anything done. So it was fun.

When you actually think about it, if you're not one of these big web scale companies, servers are simple. Code's not that complicated, even if the code's complicated. You can make changes if you just don't get in your own way. So, yeah.

When you actually think about it, if you're not one of these big web scale companies, servers are simple. Code's not that complicated, even if the code's complicated. You can make changes if you just don't get in your own way. So, yeah.

As a game, maybe.

As a game, maybe.

It did. It felt very much like a game. But I think that's how I approach most of this work. Like I said, I think the job I'm at now, we've got a big, massive old code base. I now work on a fork of Rhino.js.

It did. It felt very much like a game. But I think that's how I approach most of this work. Like I said, I think the job I'm at now, we've got a big, massive old code base. I now work on a fork of Rhino.js.

I don't know if you all remember Rhino.

I don't know if you all remember Rhino.

Yep, that sounds about right. It is a JavaScript implementation written in Java. So there's a compile to JVM bytecode and an interpreter all written in Java. It was abandoned years and years ago, but I now work at a company that has a long-term fork of it that runs millions and millions of lines of customer JavaScript.

Yep, that sounds about right. It is a JavaScript implementation written in Java. So there's a compile to JVM bytecode and an interpreter all written in Java. It was abandoned years and years ago, but I now work at a company that has a long-term fork of it that runs millions and millions of lines of customer JavaScript.

And it's got some custom features.

And it's got some custom features.

Sounds good. Yeah, so we're now trying to refactor away from it. But for example, in our original version of JavaScript that people still use to this day, if you did dots, it was like doing question mark dot. So if it was undefined, it wouldn't throw an error. It would just return undefined. This was a choice by the founder of the company.

Sounds good. Yeah, so we're now trying to refactor away from it. But for example, in our original version of JavaScript that people still use to this day, if you did dots, it was like doing question mark dot. So if it was undefined, it wouldn't throw an error. It would just return undefined. This was a choice by the founder of the company.

Like, I guess I just have a knack for finding these code bases. I don't know what it is. Where things are just crazy. And I think a lot of developers work in these kinds of things, right? They just don't talk about them publicly. Totally, totally.

Like, I guess I just have a knack for finding these code bases. I don't know what it is. Where things are just crazy. And I think a lot of developers work in these kinds of things, right? They just don't talk about them publicly. Totally, totally.