Alright, gather ’round folks, let me tell you about this one time, this… this thing we internally, and not so kindly, nicknamed “johnny poo poo.” Yeah, I know, sounds childish, but believe me, after you’d spent a week wrestling with it, you’d be calling it worse.
So, What Was This ‘Johnny Poo Poo’?
It wasn’t a person, thank goodness. It was this ancient piece of software, a critical part of an old system that just… refused to die. Nobody wrote it, at least nobody still around. It was like it spontaneously came into existence in the dark ages of computing, all cobwebs and cryptic code. And like a festering wound, everyone just tried to work around it. It would hiccup, it would burp, it would cause all sorts of weird downstream problems, and everyone would just sigh and say, “Oh, that’s just johnny poo poo acting up again.”
My turn in the barrel came, as it always does. We had this new initiative, a big push to modernize some of our core stuff. And guess what was sitting right in the middle of the pathway, like a stubborn old goat? Yep. Johnny poo poo. My boss, bless his heart, came to me with that look. You know the one. The “I know this is awful, but you’re the only one who might actually figure it out without setting the building on fire” look. Apparently, my reputation for being able to untangle knotted fishing lines with my teeth had preceded me into the digital realm.
Diving In: The Not-So-Fun Part
So, my journey began. First, I tried to find any documentation. Hah! That was a good laugh. What I found was a sticky note from five years prior that just said “Reboot if angry.” Super helpful.
My process, if you can call it that, was pretty much this:
- Staring. Lots and lots of staring at lines of code that looked like someone had sneezed alphabet soup onto the screen.
- Guessing. I’d change a small thing, cross my fingers, and see if the whole system exploded. Sometimes it did. Good times.
- Coffee. Buckets of it. I think I single-handedly kept the local coffee shop in business that month.
- Talking to myself. Out loud. Sometimes arguing with the code. My coworkers started giving me a wide berth.
- Whiteboarding. I drew diagrams that looked like a toddler’s impression of a spider web. Trying to map out how this… thing even thought it was supposed to work.
It was slow. Painfully slow. There were days I’d go home feeling like I’d achieved absolutely nothing, just bashed my head against a digital brick wall. I remember one particular Tuesday, I found a variable named `temp_var_final_really_final_this_time_02`. That told me everything I needed to know about the original developer’s state of mind.
The Breakthrough, Sort Of
After what felt like an eternity, I started to see patterns. Tiny, almost invisible glimmers of logic in the madness. It was like being an archaeologist, dusting off some ancient relic and finally figuring out it wasn’t just a rock, it was a… well, a slightly less confusing rock.
I didn’t rewrite the whole thing. That would have been a Herculean task, probably impossible without breaking a dozen other things I didn’t even know existed. No, my goal became containment and understanding. I managed to isolate the really problematic bits, put some better error handling around them, and document, for the love of all that is holy, I documented what I found. I wrote down what it did, why it was terrible, and how to placate it when it threw a tantrum.
Did I fix “johnny poo poo”? Not really. It’s still there, lurking. But it’s a bit less poo-pooey, if you catch my drift. It’s more understood. People aren’t quite as terrified of it now. We even managed to get the new initiative moving forward, carefully stepping around its more fragile parts.
So, yeah. That was my adventure with “johnny poo poo.” Not glamorous, not exciting in the traditional sense, but it was a job that needed doing. Sometimes you just gotta roll up your sleeves and wade into the muck. It’s not always about building shiny new things; sometimes it’s about making the old, creaky things just a little less likely to fall apart on your head. And hey, at least now I have a good story to tell, right?