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Search - "code archeologist"
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How much legacy code do I need to understand and fix before I add Software Archeologist to my LinkedIn?6
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Everytime I'm digging into some random legacy code where no one knows its original intention I'm seeing "Software Archeologist" as a well-paid job sooner or later...
Fucking undocumented legacy code...1 -
is the job of being a "software engineer" (code monkey) supposed to be many parts of wannabe archeologist figuring out what the fuck is going on, happened, and reading the codebase , so you can figure out how to implement your jira ticket?3
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Another terrible rant from the inhereted Hydra source code. So deep in the dark dungeon of that code I noticed something interesting. They declare this INT32 array with an incredibly long (like 200 values) list of hard coded magic numbers. Something along the lines of:
INT32 array[200] = {-1,0,1,21,4,7,19,33...};
However, the resulting output was incorrect. After spending a fort night and a good chunk of my remaining sanity I had overcone the 437 levels of indirection left by the previous programmers, and narrowed it down to this line. But it looked perfectly fine.
I pull up the diffs and notice someone had checked in a change to the source. I track it to this line and find what the original data had been.
INT32 array[200] = {-1,0,1,2l,4,7,19,33...};
In VS the default font shows l and 1 as fucking identical. Someone had accidentally made that change to 21 from the original 2l and checked it in. I mean I can't really blame them. Who the fucking hell inatantiates a fucking int32 array and peppers in a fucking 2l (long) for no fucking reason?!