Just discovered https://twitter.com/ExpertBeginner1. It's the story of my life. Giant classes, copying and pasting, and architects who create frameworks. It's great when we combine all three: A "framework" created by an architect which is made of giant classes that you copy and paste. Imagine a giant generic class where the generic argument is only used by dead code. Pause for a moment and try to visualize that.

It inherits from a base class with lots of virtual methods called by base methods that throw NotImplementedException, so if you don't need them you have to override them to return empty collections. If you're going to do something so messed up you could just put those default implementations in the base. But no, you can inherit, it compiles, and then it throws a runtime error unless you override methods the compiler doesn't require you to override.

The one method you're required to override has a TODO comment telling you what to put there. Except don't ever do what the comment says because that's the old standard. The new standard says never, ever do that.

Most of the time when I read about copy-and-paste coding it's about devs who copy and paste because they don't know how to write or reuse code. They don't mention the environments where copying and pasting the same classes over and over again is the requirement and you're not allowed to write your own code.

Creating base classes where you just override a method or two can potentially work, but only in the right scenarios and only if you do it right. If you're copying and pasting a class that inherits from the base class and consists entirely of repeated code, why the heck isn't that the base class? It could be a total mess, but at least it would be out of sight and each successive developer wouldn't become responsible for it by including it in their own code.

It's a temporary engagement, but I feel almost violated. I know it's a first-world problem, and I get to work indoors and take vacations. I'm grateful for those things.

Before leaving I had to document the entire process of copying and pasting an entire repo, making a ton of baseline edits that should just be in the template but aren't, and then copying and pasting from other places into the copied and pasted code. That makes me a collaborator. I apologize more than once in the documentation, all 20 pages of it that you have to read and follow before you even get to the part where you write the code for what you actually need it to do.

This architect has succeeded in making every single thing anyone does more about servicing the needs of his "framework" than about writing actual code to do what needs doing. Now that the framework is in and around everything it creates the illusion that it's a critical part of our operations. It's not. It's useless overhead.

Because management is deceived into thinking they need it they overlook the fact that it blows up, big and small, every single day. The log is full of failures that I know no one ever sees. A big chunk of what they think it does fails silently, and they don't even notice until months later when they realize how much data they're missing. But if they lose, say, 25% they'll never notice.

When they do notice they just act like it's normal, go into fire drill mode, and fix it. Doom. You're all doomed. I'm standing on the deck of the Titanic next to my jet ski.