At an old employer there were 15,000 lines of batch script across 14 .bat files on a Windows laptop. Old director of IT used it to onboard new customers. It basically copied a DB and turned "CHANGE ME" in some columns to the client's name.
It had it all. 5k lines of date validation, 3k lines of "UI", 400 goto statements, hard-coded passwords, versioning by incrementing the file names (leading to a bunch of code that was never called), and to top it off a static IP granted to the laptop that used as a part of authentication.
Took me two weeks to unravel it and replace with ~20 lines of Ruby.
Later, all of my complaining on Facebook led an old professor to invite me back to give a talk on the importance of code quality!
At an old employer there were 15,000 lines of batch script across 14 .bat files on a Windows laptop. Old director of IT used it to onboard new customers. It basically copied a DB and turned "CHANGE ME" in some columns to the client's name.
It had it all. 5k lines of date validation, 3k lines of "UI", 400 goto statements, hard-coded passwords, versioning by incrementing the file names (leading to a bunch of code that was never called), and to top it off a static IP granted to the laptop that used as a part of authentication.
Took me two weeks to unravel it and replace with ~20 lines of Ruby.
Later, all of my complaining on Facebook led an old professor to invite me back to give a talk on the importance of code quality!