Working Preferences

As I was saying yesterday, currently I’m slightly swamped with work, but at the same time I’m finding myself a bit disinterested in at least one major dollop of the stuff I’m currently involved with. It’s not a great combination really, is it?

And of course that conflict has raised up some interesting issues for me, and some analysis of my working preferences. Hence the title.

In my normal job at the moment, I’m (finally) getting some interesting stuff to do, bringing the site into the 20th century, adding in some database-driven functionality, making it more dynamic (in the context of using server-side stuff to generate the pages, and do it smoothly and consistently) and generally letting my brain work on some groovy stuff that they want/need. In short, for me, it’s fun.

In the other big piece of work, I’ve got to adapt an existing piece of software to the client’s requirements- they’ve paid for the software already, and while it’s OK for their needs, it doesn’t do all the bits that they want it to over the next few months. So I get to figure out how/why it works, and extend things. OK, not so bad, all things considered.

Except that well, it’s boring. While integrating new bits into this site software is a challenge, and will provide a lot of work, most of that is because the way it’s currently written is fucking shocking. It’s got some major issues -things like templating classes being used for no good reason (and I must admit, personally I loathe templating classes in most circumstances) which just make the site overly complex – and run like a three-legged arthritic dog with piles. As for amending it or extending the functionality, well, good fucking luck.

More importantly, though (and something I only discovered today) is that this site software has some major security issues. Techies will know what I mean (and pull agonised faces) when I say that the site is hyper-prone to SQL Injection attacks. And this is a company that’s expecting the site to hold data on upwards of 50,000 people. Believe me, it’s a major worry, and one that can’t be easily fixed without even more rewrites of the entire thing.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I’m coming to the conclusion that actually, I really don’t like going through other people’s code and trying to figure out what the hell they were thinking. I know that in the time it’s taking me to figure this stuff out, I could be writing something from scratch that’d do the job properly, rather than trying to force someone else’s software to do the same thing, only less well.

I can’t deny it, I’m bored. I’m uninspired by the entire analyse/adapt process, and I’d rather just get on with writing my own version. I enjoy writing new stuff, figuring out problems, getting things working. I hate fixing challenges when they’re caused by someone else writing abysmal code – and getting paid for it.

I think that’s what really gets to me. The creators have been paid for this piece of crap, and have probably swanned off and sold it to a number of other places too. And while it works, it really is a heap of cack when it comes to doing anything else with it. Maybe I need to write my own version and try selling that in competition with the existing product.

Then at least some other techie could look at my stuff and swear at it before writing their own version.