Revisiting your own (old) code

Almost two weeks ago I received a call for a good friend of mine, and also owner of an Hardware Store, those kind of familiar SMEs that are commited to survive through the years thanks for the every effort and their commitment to the service more over than the product.

Returning to the point, I developed an small Web Application for managing the Hardware Store, very basic: Customers, Products, Categories, Billing, and so. That was on 2004, long time ago, the main porpuse of the project was to migrate from the previous software installed (MSDOS based, yes!). So I suggested to move to Server-Client capabilities with Web based system, due the lack of resources of the server I also suggested to go simple with alrady purchased software: Windows XP Pro. So you get the idea, IIS, ASP Classic (at these time I was starting .net but I was more handy with PHP, ASP and so,…). The thing is once you see the old-fashion code I was feeling with a mixture of shame and pride.

The Spaggetti-code times

The main problem those days was how to avoid the spaggetti-code, how to separate the layers to avoid coupling on logic and presentation. That was the first thing I remembered when I was revisiting the code. I remembered my self trying to solve the puzzle of creating the HTML structure on the fly reading the objects from the database. That was inspired by previous projects and common problems faced but I felt kind of proud from my past me.

The include file

Of course also the approach was to separate the business logic from the functionality / controller that was also included in the project, the only thing is that all the controlled was included in one library making the class complexity very high.

The Documentation and code style

Another thing that I’m very proud of is the documentation included in the main class. Is well structured and aimed to be used and maintained. Cool. The documentation skills is something that I’m working on improving a lot.

Final thoughts

The exercise of revisiting your own code is a good practice to see what have you learned and what you should keep working on. I see it like a retrospective on the evolution of yourself as a coder. This was because my friend need several modifications and I realized that a 17 years old code was telling me some history about myself.

Try it yourself, you may find some take aways from the exercise.