Jimmy Miller

I think that was one of the lessons I had to learn was just how clever you can be and how much you can solve a problem with the most complicated code you could possibly imagine. And yet, for the end person, they don't care. It doesn't really matter. But for me, I don't know. I've never been a business-y person. I like coding because I think coding itself is really interesting.

I think that was one of the lessons I had to learn was just how clever you can be and how much you can solve a problem with the most complicated code you could possibly imagine. And yet, for the end person, they don't care. It doesn't really matter. But for me, I don't know. I've never been a business-y person. I like coding because I think coding itself is really interesting.

And so for this first job, it was kind of a shock of like, this is what I have to deal with? this ugly grossness. But I think that that's changed a bit. I look back on those moments quite fondly. So yeah, maybe I should talk a little bit more in detail about... I'm assuming most people haven't read the blog post or whatever. Happy to fill in some background of what was this code base look like?

And so for this first job, it was kind of a shock of like, this is what I have to deal with? this ugly grossness. But I think that that's changed a bit. I look back on those moments quite fondly. So yeah, maybe I should talk a little bit more in detail about... I'm assuming most people haven't read the blog post or whatever. Happy to fill in some background of what was this code base look like?

What are the weird things going on in it? Or...

What are the weird things going on in it? Or...

Yeah. So let me paint a little picture of like the, you know, the company. So this is a big, you know, like I said, a big credit card processing company, but the actual office I'm at is almost all staffed by customer support people. There's just this like one room that's developers, probably like 80 developers or so in this one big, huge open office. Wow.

Yeah. So let me paint a little picture of like the, you know, the company. So this is a big, you know, like I said, a big credit card processing company, but the actual office I'm at is almost all staffed by customer support people. There's just this like one room that's developers, probably like 80 developers or so in this one big, huge open office. Wow.

And we're all writing this software for these customer support people. It's totally separate off from the rest of the credit card processing business. This is all bespoke software built up over the last 10 years. This is like... 2012 is when I joined this company. So it was a little bit behind the times, even for then. Very stuck in the past of how software is being done.

And we're all writing this software for these customer support people. It's totally separate off from the rest of the credit card processing business. This is all bespoke software built up over the last 10 years. This is like... 2012 is when I joined this company. So it was a little bit behind the times, even for then. Very stuck in the past of how software is being done.

But I don't know, it's your typical, the customer support people are all really serious, have to dress a little nicer, and the developers are all kind of chilling, shooting each other with Nerf guns and being a little bit more wild. Yeah. But the code was the kind of part that everyone wanted to ignore. The stuff I was on was... I started as an intern.

But I don't know, it's your typical, the customer support people are all really serious, have to dress a little nicer, and the developers are all kind of chilling, shooting each other with Nerf guns and being a little bit more wild. Yeah. But the code was the kind of part that everyone wanted to ignore. The stuff I was on was... I started as an intern.

It was like the legacy code base that the professional developers didn't want to touch anymore. There were all these teams who were going and redoing the big rewrites. And the interns and a couple developers were kind of shoved on this old legacy project. That was just... So the database itself, I talk about in the articles about we ran out of columns.

It was like the legacy code base that the professional developers didn't want to touch anymore. There were all these teams who were going and redoing the big rewrites. And the interns and a couple developers were kind of shoved on this old legacy project. That was just... So the database itself, I talk about in the articles about we ran out of columns.

The database is this massive database with the merchant's table, which has 1,024 columns because that's the most you could have in SQL Server. The code base is hundreds of thousands of lines of C Sharp and VB. And the reason it's kind of split is they decided halfway through to change from VB to C Sharp.

The database is this massive database with the merchant's table, which has 1,024 columns because that's the most you could have in SQL Server. The code base is hundreds of thousands of lines of C Sharp and VB. And the reason it's kind of split is they decided halfway through to change from VB to C Sharp.

But the whole way it worked was session state got stored in the database every single time you changed pages so it could swap back and forth between the VB and C Sharp world. It's this crazy bespoke IIS setup that takes days to get running on your machine.

But the whole way it worked was session state got stored in the database every single time you changed pages so it could swap back and forth between the VB and C Sharp world. It's this crazy bespoke IIS setup that takes days to get running on your machine.

The whole thing was just, yeah, kind of duct taped, terrible code base, every JavaScript framework you could possibly imagine. And the task as an intern was, here's a big list of bugs and features that we don't want to actually spend developer time on. This is your job now.

The whole thing was just, yeah, kind of duct taped, terrible code base, every JavaScript framework you could possibly imagine. And the task as an intern was, here's a big list of bugs and features that we don't want to actually spend developer time on. This is your job now.