So, cruft. The software equivalent of those boxes in the back of the closet that you take with you every time you move, but you never open them or really remember what’s in them, and a few more show up each time, until they form part of the load-bearing infrastructure of your house and you’re afraid to even touch any of them, never mind unpack them or throw them away, and the only realistic way of dealing with it all is the cleansing power of fire.

What was I talking about? Software, right.

It might seem obvious that the actual way to deal with cruft, and other kinds of technical debt, is to just clean up as you go, and that’s definitely a winning strategy, in theory. But just like with a house, there’s usually one person who Really Hates Mess and they drive all the cleaning initiatives, until one day they come down with sleeping sickness or dancing plague, or get a really awesome job offer from a company in Siberia, and with them out of the picture the rest of the household just start stacking their plates and dirty socks in heaps until that’s all that’s holding up the roof, and the only realistic way of dealing with it all is to summon Meteor.

If you’re a person who Really Hates Mess and you get hired on at a company with infrastructure or code older than the average time a helium balloon stays aloft, there’ll be junk code and snowflake servers aplenty to dig into and improve, which can be a really good way of contributing in an impactful way. Seriously, finding something that’s a pain point that no one wants to get into because it’s basically the Augean stables and tackling it will make your new team love you. At the same time, before you grab your shovel, it’s really important to determine whether it’s worth mucking it out at all. Sometimes it needs replacing, either because it’s in such a bad place it’d take longer to fix, or because a better way emerged in the interim, and sometimes it just needs purging. With fire. Or meteor.

A few jobs back I found out we were hosting a “secure FTP” service. It turned out to be a server running Windows Server 2003 in the mid 2010s, and was directly connected to the internet through a public facing IP address. The “secure FTP” part was a not-sFTP site serving one all-purpose, open directory, accessed using one set of user credentials, which were shared with every customer via unencrypted email. Half my hair spontaneously fell out when I found it. Several coworkers were upset at me for immediately purifying it, because how else were they supposed to collect HIPAA files from customers? I don’t know, how about the legal-department-approved, HIPAA-audited, third-party secure file sharing service we already have???

It’s not all bad though. Today a colleague called me over to help him poke at a particularly messy bit of tech debt that’s been my bane since I started this job, but had been told was fine and not to do anything with it because it was fine. Gentle reader, it is only fine in the “this is fine” sense (look, it’s a theme!). Colleague asked, was it our manager who said it was fine? No. Was it the senior who said it was fine? No. Was it ex-coworker-who’s-ex-for-a-reason? Yessssss. And this is why I respect Colleague, because his response was essentially “well screw that, let’s burn it down right now and make something that works and doesn’t suck”. Heck yes.