My Worst Code Was My Best Code – Liam Westley – NDC Oslo 2023

“Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.”

–Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review

Sometimes this means we produce some bizarre code, some of our worst code, either through lack of knowledge or understanding, or due to the time constraints we were given.

But some of that worst code, ends up being some of our best code, in that it exceled at what it was required to do, solved problems that weren’t even envisaged and was ultimately successful.

Liam will take a meander through some past projects that appeared reasonable at the time, but now seem pretty mad ideas

* macros in Windows 3.1 to make Corel Draw into a weather map creation system
* running a UK general election at Sky News in VB6 pause and continue
* creating a database cache on top of an Access MDB file
* abusing the HTML DOM for a ticketing system
* using the file system as a messaging queue for ingesting the back catalogue of EMI, Warner Music Group and Sony Records

At some point you will find yourself writing some of your worst code, but can take comfort in that it might also be some of your best code.

Just not something you would put on your CV.

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