Your Old Crappy Code

If you’re not new to software, you’ve probably come across some old code of yours and thought:

Oh snap! What is this? What was I thinking?

I’ve done it. My friends and colleagues have done. You’ve probably done it as well.

Recently some friends and former co-workers of mine reached out and asked if I’d like to help out part time doing some front-end work. I thought it might be fun to do some contract work on the side and even more fun to work with awesome people I haven’t worked with in about 2.5 years.

Last night, I came across some old JavaScript of mine, here were my reactions:

1. Nostalgia: Oh hey! I wrote this!
2. Shame: Wow, this isn’t very good. I can do much better now. How embarrassing to think that I once thought this was production worthy.
3. Sleep: I actually went to sleep because it was late.
4. Pride: That code still works fine even though it’s not super pretty. Even better, since I wrote it over 5 years ago, by my calculations it’s been successfully executed over 7 billion times!

I woke up feeling much better about my “not perfect” code. It’s not about beauty, it’s about value. So next time you find that ugly, embarrassing code you wrote 1 year, 5 years, or even further back in time. If it’s still in production and providing value, take some pride in it!