Not to rant for my first post but …
Working in the programming industry can be so infuriating sometimes. When someone decides to go into programming they basically know that they will be working long hours and often working in teams of people. Some times though you get those glorious moments where you get to work by yourself on a nice little project. I have several of these little projects at my current job. Lets call them my little babies.
Unfortunately as a programmer you often get quite attached to these little projects and you have no desire for anyone else to touch them. Often times the higher ups are quite content to let them stay that way. But sometimes the powers that be decide to rain fire and brimstone down upon you. They seize your project and give it to someone else. And lets face it as programmers that other person is always going to be an inferior programmer. We are a conceited bunch and always feel that our code is better than that of our coworkers. Why who knows, thats just the way it is.
I have been working on a project now for the better part of two years. It is actually a fairly intricate website with lots of little things to be considered. The client that this site is for is how do we say this nicely a wee bit picky. They change their mind a lot and we often have to guide them by the hand to make them see things our way. But likewise we often have to give them what they want also. They are the client after all.
So back to my baby. One of the things that I have written for them is a fairly elaborate registration system. It all depends on how you come to the site and what you plan on doing once there. are you registering for the conference, or are you just here to see past conference materials. None the less the system is elaborate. Now I am not saying the system is perfect. It was after all written 2 years ago. That was right when I had started working for my current company. I was also right out of college. While I had been programing for many years, I still had a lot to learn. I consider myself to be a much better programer now then I was 2 years ago. That being said in looking at the code there are a great number of places that I would change the code to be a lot more efficient and readable.
Now most projects I am glad to get off my plate and passed onto one of the junior developers. However this project should never of been soiled by the touch of the lesser programmers. See I told you we are all conceited. Oh well, the powers that be deemed that the project should be moved to someone else. Which in theory I was fine with. I warned my bosses of the drawbacks, sometimes they listen. Now this has been in someone else’s hands now for several weeks, but due to deadlines this has now come back to me. In theory I know the ins and outs of this so I should be able to wrap everything up in a neat little bow.
Wrong, because the other programmer was not familiar with how things worked in these registration pages I now find myself having to write workaround code just to get this prepped to be rolled out. And man is it a mess. If time allowed I would scrap the other developers code and rewrite the whole thing. (Definitely not the first time I have had to do this.) But the project is due today so I am stuck with the workarounds for now. Oh joy.
I was thrown back into this project with about 2 workdays before the project was due and it still probably had about a weeks worth of coding left to go not to mention thorough testing. Oh well I better get coding otherwise I will never finish this thing.