Alright, let me tell you about this thing I ran into recently, this whole ‘raw hole justin’ situation. Wasn’t pretty.
It started when I got handed this piece of a project. Supposedly ‘mostly done’. Yeah, right. The guy before me, let’s call him Justin, he just vanished. Left behind this… well, this raw hole right in the middle of everything. No notes, no documentation, nothing. Just a chunk of code that didn’t work and nobody knew why.
So, first thing I did was try to run it. Crashed immediately. Okay, typical Tuesday. I started digging into the code Justin left. Man, it was a mess. Variables named like ‘thingy1’, ‘data2’, functions that seemed to do five different things at once, or maybe nothing at all. It was like reading someone’s dream journal.
Digging In
I spent, no joke, two solid days just trying to map out what was connected to what. I drew diagrams on a whiteboard, trying to follow the logic. It felt like detective work, but the clues were all gibberish.
- Tried tracing the data flow. It went in, got mangled, and then… poof. Disappeared.
- Looked for any comments. Found one. It said “// TODO: Fix this later”. Super helpful, Justin.
- Asked around if anyone knew what Justin was trying to do. Got a lot of shrugs. Seems he wasn’t big on sharing.
The worst part was this one function. It looked crucial, like the heart of the whole damn thing. But it was half-written. There were calls to other parts that didn’t exist yet, logic that just stopped mid-thought. It was a raw, gaping hole in the process.
Patching it Up
After wasting way too much time trying to understand Justin’s ‘vision’, I decided to just rip it out. The hole, I mean. The whole damn section. It felt brutal, like performing surgery with a chainsaw, but what choice did I have?
I had to figure out what it was supposed to do, based on where the inputs came from and where the outputs were supposed to go. Then, I just rebuilt that logic from scratch. My way. Cleanly. With actual meaningful names and maybe even a comment or two explaining what the heck is going on.
It took another day or so, but finally, I got it working. Plugged my new piece into the gap left by Justin’s mess. Ran the whole thing. It worked. No crashes. Data went in, got processed correctly, came out the other side.
So, yeah. Dealt with the ‘raw hole justin’ thing. Basically had to throw out the ‘justin’ part and fill the ‘raw hole’ myself. It’s frustrating, though. You inherit these messes, these black holes left by people who just didn’t care or didn’t know better, and you’re the one stuck cleaning it up. Waste of time, really. But hey, at least it works now. Onto the next fire.
