Mentally Exhausted
As a programmer/software developer, there are days that are just mentally exhausting. Today was one of those days for me. I have been working on a bridge to allow two systems to easily communicate with each other for the past month (really, i should say, I have been working on it off and on, you know how priorities go...).
The bridge is fairly straight-forward, if you completely know the products you are bridging together. However, I had to bridge eight different applications with another outside (as in, outside our network) application. Three of the applications I know very well, as I played a significant role in their development. One of them I knew fairly well and could easily figure out as it was written in an old language our company used that mimics JavaScript. Three of them, of which I have had no interaction with were also written in the older language, and so I figured them out, but it took more work than the prior applications. Finally, the last one I have hardly had any interaction with and it is in .NET... yet it is the one that has been giving me troubles for the past week.
.NET is easy and overly complicated at the same time. Poorly designed code can quickly confuse even the best of minds. Then add on code that is written in the application but never physically used, just adds on to the complication and torments the developer trying to learn how this program works. That was today in a nutshell. Code found in one place that looks exactly like what you wanted to see, ends up never being used throughout the rest of the application for unknown reasons and to top it off, when you ask the developers who work in it on a daily basis, they too have no idea why that code exists.
Don't get me wrong, I am not here to bash the previous developers who wrote this mysterious code, but to give myself a mental note. Remove code that is no longer used from the project as soon as it makes sense to do so. Leaving it behind will only lead to greater complexity and much more confused looks on future developer faces. None of that is necessary and I for one do not want to me the reason for their headaches or confusing moments.
On the plus side of things, I got my issue worked out with the bridge and only have five more pieces to get the communication working smoothly. Plus, after racking my brain for several hours today sorting out the complexities and the confusing code, it is just FANTASTIC to see the part work right before my eyes so I know I figured it out entirely.