This is a story of how a day-to-day developer overcame his fears and came out of his comfort zone. Of how he and his team got into a project which code was so bad they cried a little when they saw it for the first time. Of how they took care of it and made it great. Of how they made clients happy and left the whole team with a “mission accomplished” feeling. Of how they finally succeeded.

Act one—The Audit

Several months ago, Magda (my dev colleague) and I were informed about a new project starting in our company. That’s always exciting. We were supposed to dive into it and analyze its primary requirements. We learned that the client requested implementation of two main features into the product—payments and some kind of analytics. Enough to compliment the MVP and making it production-ready. Easy-peasy, we thought.

The reality was much, much darker… The existing styles were completely off and everything was overlapping. Server logs were stored in the repository. Data of some views were hardcoded. We even found a method 73-lines-long, where the 10-15 is a good practice. Login form was accepting email and password but the controller was only fetching User by the former and creating a session. Passwords were stored as plain-text.

#development #culture #mvp