Alright, let me tell you about this whole ‘Manny Lopez’ situation I went through. It wasn’t a person, not really, but more like a system, a way of doing things left behind by this guy, Manny Lopez, at a place I worked a while back.
So, I started this new gig, right? And they handed me this project. They said, “Just pick up where Manny left off.” Simple enough, I thought. Boy, was I wrong. Manny had his own… unique style. Nothing was documented. I mean absolutely nothing. It was like he built this entire thing inside his head and just typed it out.
Diving In Blind
First thing I did was try to just run the darn thing. Took me half a day just to figure out the dependencies and get the environment set up. No setup guide, no notes, nothing. Just raw code. I started digging through the files, trying to map out how data flowed, what connected to what. It was messy. Variables named stuff like ‘data1’, ‘temp_final’, ‘stuff’. You know the type.
I spent days, maybe weeks, just tracing function calls. I’d put print statements everywhere, run a small part, see what happened, then try another part. It felt like archaeology, digging through layers of code trying to understand the original builder’s intent.
Hitting Walls
I tried asking around. “Hey, did you work with Manny on this?” Most people just kinda shrugged. They knew Manny, knew he was smart, but also knew he worked in his own little world. One guy told me, “Yeah, that’s Manny’s black box. Nobody touches Manny’s black box.” Great. Just what I needed.
There were specific parts that were just baffling:
- A weird data conversion routine that seemed overly complex.
- Hardcoded values sprinkled everywhere without explanation.
- A connection to some obscure third-party service I’d never even heard of.
I remember this one time, I spent two entire days trying to figure out why a certain calculation kept coming out wrong. It turned out Manny had put in this ‘temporary fix’ – basically multiplying a result by 0.985 for ‘calibration’ – and never took it out or commented on why. Just buried deep in some utility function.
Figuring It Out, Slowly
Slowly, painfully, I started making sense of it. I didn’t try to rewrite everything, that would have been suicide. Instead, I focused on understanding the core parts I absolutely needed to modify or fix. I started my own documentation. Simple stuff, really. Flowcharts sketched on paper, comments in the code explaining what I thought a block was doing.
I had to reverse engineer a lot of it. Feed it inputs, watch the outputs, guess the logic in between. It was tedious. Lots of trial and error. Lots of coffee. Eventually, I managed to isolate the sections I needed to change and carefully made my modifications, testing obsessively after each small step.
What I Learned
Honestly, dealing with the Manny Lopez legacy was a pain. But it taught me a few things. First, document your damn code. Seriously. Even small notes help the next person. Second, sometimes you just gotta roll up your sleeves and dig. You can’t always expect a clean slate or perfect handover. You figure it out piece by piece. And third, isolating problems is key. Don’t try to boil the ocean; just fix the leak you’re responsible for right now.
So yeah, that was my ‘Manny Lopez’ experience. Not a fight with a guy, but a battle with his code. Glad that one’s behind me.
