"Unraveling the 'magic' of a mysterious function"

The senior dev left a note in the codebase I inherited. It was next to a function called calculateUserLoyalty(). It read: "This is magic. Don't touch it." For 2 years, no one did. It was a black box. A sacred relic. Then, a bug emerged. I had to open it. My hands were sweating. Inside, I didn't find brilliant, complex algorithms. I found a mess. Duplicate code. A hard-coded value from 2016. But I also found a single, elegant comment that explained the 'why' behind the magic. I fixed the bug in 10 minutes. The "magic" wasn't the code. It was the business logic no one had ever documented. Now, I don't write "how" in comments. I write "why." What's the best or worst piece of code documentation you've ever found? #SoftwareDevelopment #Programming #CodeQuality #TechDebt #Developer

To view or add a comment, sign in

Explore content categories