Overall, the last few days have been quite good. I've got an opportunity to do a bit of work with Jean-Claude, who I've wanted to do a more focused project or two with. The down side is, part of it will involve a good chunk of existing code I've written. While at the lower level (coding style, documentation, tests, coupling, cohesion) it's actually pretty good, there are still all those totally arbitrary "evolutionary" high-level issues. You know, those design decisions that made sense at the time, and still work quite well, but in light of later developments, there might have been a better way to design things.
In this particular case, the benefit of fixing them doesn't justify the work needed to refactor it, but there's nothing like getting a new person involved to remind you of some of those code smells that you've gotten used to and now ignore. Mind you, it's a far cry from 8 or 9 years ago when Ted started with TeamWave, and I spent I'm sure a solid two weeks turning a mountain of totally undocumented and truly wretched code (i.e. "university code") into something that was only moderately horrific. It wasn't quite enough to cause carpal tunnel, but pretty darn close. Never again.
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