This genius made his very own super-flexible-and-versatile-never-seen-before-mvc-framework, with no documentation about the code, instead of just donwloading and implementing a popular one.

He left the company.

I maintain it.

Fell my pain.

No thank, I hope I never get to 😓

I’m in the exact same position. Damn.

Place a severed horse head on his doorstep.

Does it help? No.

Does it give peace to your soul? Absolutely!

Be that violent psychopath he should have been thinking about

When I say "genius" is not sarcasm, the code is beautiful indeed, the guy is ninja. Only problem is that there is no link in StackOverflow.

So either replace the code with a popular framework or don't. If the code is truly beautiful then maybe there is no need for replacement. Is the pain from the fact that you have to extend functionality to add new features?

Sounds like me. Hehehe. Only difference is the framework I made is ugly af.

@gosubinit
Your new job: document that stuff.

You are in the perspective of "not knowing" that means you still know the questions an unknowing user would ask. Explaining to others is a very good way to learn and documenting it is almost like that.

Working through a well made software is a nice learning experience. Good luck.

Documentation is for the weak

@CWins nah. That's not reality unfortunately. We are going to maintain as we can and start rebuilding from scratch in a few months. This time, using stuff people have heard about.

Where I work is kinda the same except its on top of a framework. Man i should write a rant about it some day.

@gosubinit
Okay, then get back to the plan with the severed horse head!

@gosubinit The guy who did the framework for my codebase worked on it alone for 5 (!) years. Now it’s a crucial part of the company and my team discovers new things every week. The guy who made it quit like two years ago and his name is like the name of Voldemort, you’re not allowed to say it.

It’s a solid framework but it’s sometimes hard to make changes to it.

@zshh upvote for the Voldemort comparison. Same here.

He must be one of those "no comments needed, good code speaks for itself" kind of low-lifes who don't care about maintainability or future peeps who have to take care of that nonsense. Not that documentation matters because the code doesn't lie of course no matter how unintelligable it is. Yup no comments needed. Screw that!

@arcadesdude even if it was well documented, reinventing the wheel is for the academy, or essentially tech/scientific companies. At real companies from ordinary industries, time is money, and they don't allocate much budget for development.

@gosubinit agree with you, reinventing the wheel is not practical in business. Just if you can't use tried and tested framework...and importantly documented code due to work limitations or whatever then whoever originally created the base you have to work for should properly comment or document it to make it easier on you or anyone that has to work from it. Tech debt can be a pain to recover from.

@nickhh The pain is that nobody here have time to learn how it works and we all know to work with popular frameworks (won't mention which to not promote any). The place I work is not a purely IT company, dev can't be the time bottleneck of the operation.