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The Politest GTFO
12:46:58 pm on September 13, 2005 | # |
One side effect of working at a large company is that a certain level of professional protocol is required. In this instance, it resulted in the politest GTFO I have ever received.
I wrote up a suggestion to the infrastructure guy about how helpful it would be to use the master control script (MVC – controller) concept instead of having 40 lines of includes and “dont touch this” code on everyones PHP scripts.
His response was as sweet and professional as a quick shove out the door can be:
I don’t think that kind of change is on the books in the near future. While it might be a nice approach and a different way to solve the problem, the current approach is fairly ingrained, works and is very widespread. Changes to this part of the infrastructure would require changes on every web page we have. As we discuss issues with the infrastructure going ahead I’ll keep this in mind.
I’m sure that at one time, Ford said this to someone suggesting that they could make it so the Pinto didn’t blow up anymore… just a thought.
bucky 12:52 pm on September 13, 2005 | #
Yeah thats just painful. Im sure an infrastructure change would be code hell, but if the direction they are going now is such a PITA, you have to look at how many worker hours it is to keep developing under that platform, contrasted with how many hours it is to recode with a better pattern.
One thing to keep in mind is that it is not always the best idea to totally start from scratch and through out all the code, that approach won’t always yield a version 5.0 (netscape cough cough). But sometimes you gotta do it.
And when you think about it, some of the problems you have already solved, data access, ACLs, templating, etc, can just be refactored, and not neccessarily re-written. So it could be a very fast process.
Fast until that stuff those engineers label as “Don’t Touch This” in the CVS is 40,000 lines of code to extract one element out of an array, and they are just too embarassed to let that show.