Code Mainentance

One of the problems with an under-resourced development environment, such as the one I'm involved in at iTL, is the lack of decent code review. Consequently, the code base ends up with dirty little secrets, like the routines to automatically identify the calibration cube, a awkwardly tangled implementation of what still is actually quite a good idea. It's a chunk of code I'm both perversely proud of, and terrified someone else will look at and thus call me out as a total fraud.

Despite this, it actually works pretty well almost all the time, which is unfortunately an "almost" too many, so today was spent debugging this dirty little secret, which is never that much fun. It's easier than it may sound, though. Most programmers will have had the experience of looking at old code and thinking "How could this possibly ever work?", and most programmers will also have experienced looking at bits of old code and realizing "Oh, that actually quite a nifty trick". For me, reading this code tends to be a sequence of a's followed by b's followed by a's and so on. When the sequence doesn't end at b, it's probably a bug. The retroactive ego-boosting and deflating does make it a slightly bizarre experience, though, and not one I'm keen to repeat anytime soon.