Jake Hackl

Note: this is taken from my previous blog.

With one of my accounts I’m patching up the holes in an older web app; this is one of those projects that screams for a redo as it has lived x years with to many people doing the painting with different brushes.

A positive from this, besides helping the client of course, is that this has been a chance for me to see the sort of slop that is out there. I have been fortunate through most of career to work with great developers (IMHO) and generally avoid touching slop. But now seeing this I know that when enough people throw slop it will turn into a big mess.

The point? This is another example of wet band-aids; they just don’t stick. When we stray from finding straight-forward simple solutions that truly tackle the problem and instead add a band-aid, worse a wet band-aid, then soon we can’t even see the skin. And you get left in my spot where I am trying to understand the domain model by debugging .NET calls to a stored proc that references views and embedded SQL functions.