Old times...

Today I've been browsing through my old applications and libraries. You know... the kind of code you'd never look back at :)

It's funny that after all those years (3 to be exact) when I look at the code it still looks nice and fresh. I must have known what I was doing :D

Jokes aside here's a story to think about:

Imagine a project involving 2 to 3 developers, based on bad assumptions and lack of a good idea. This project went on and on for years (2 years to be exact). The idea was simple: take an application that used Pervasive's BTRV API and make it work under some RDBMS. Like I said it took many developers (for this kind of idea to come true) and many years... And in the end it didn't work... In the mean time (since I'm the kind of guy that 'knows better') I've decided to do a little spike and to see how much effort it'd take to create something like that but in a more, let's say, clever fasion. As it turned out it took me 3 days to get the whole idea to run in read-only mode (I never got so far to implement the update operations even though everything is ready to do them). 3 days!!! I mean, are people really so blinded by the fact that they don't want to do rewrites that it forces them to spend years of wasted work and hundreds of kilos of dollars just not to say they've made a mistake???

Man that was really fun to look at again and to remember those old times...