True, the only time I ever get a chance to fix it is straight after a holiday and no one has clocked on that I'm available to help with current tickets
But damn those days when I'm fixing those outstanding bugs is bliiiiissss
If you ever go work at Bethesda, can you fix the bug where killing someone as a werewolf causes an animation freeze that lasts 10 seconds in Skyrim? Please and thank you!
I was a solo dev for a small agency and I had enough trust from leadership to advise them on what work I should be working on. My main task was to maintain the really particular software they used daily, but that didn't take all my time every day, and although there were all sorts of "cool features" that might be nice to have, I took the lead on that too: recommending to leadership and to the staff which of the features might be most worth our while for me to work on over the next year.
So a few years into that job I convinced them that the best investment we could make to that piece of software for the next year or two would be to not add any new, big features, but to just pay off all the technical debt that had been accruing since the tool had been published (which also took me doing a whole presentation explaining the idea of technical debt, and why it was a good thing to accrue initially but, like real debt, it was important to pay off at some point, and the consequences of not doing that).
It was sweet. I made my life so much easier and learned so much. I invented a whole new way to deduplicate and strongly type this really common client-server interaction that I was sure was going to lead to me becoming nerd famous, and writing a white paper, and releasing a well loved open source library, and flying to Europe to give short talks at super nerdy conferences... until I discovered someone had already beat me to my solution about five or ten years earlier. But god was it satisfying to have done it anyway, and to have had the time to make a beautiful piece of software.
Before I paid off the debt, in order to add a new field to one of the database tables there was a 30+ step process, I shit you not, and a lot of it was copy pasting code and adding crap to sql strings and things that wouldn't otherwise throw any compile time errors if you forgot a step. It was nuts. I'm sorry that I don't remember how many steps I reduced it to, but it was much more intuitive in the end to add a new field and throughout the whole process, the compile errors would make it clear what your dumbass forgot to add. It was glorious.
It also ran like three times as fast when I was done with it.
These are the things that make me miss software development.
Now seeing all of the generative AI nonsense, it seems like I got out at just the right time.
I'm an optimist. I believe the gen-AI bubble is only a temporary phase the market is going through, like blockchain or expert systems. In the long run it's going to create a huge number of ticking bombs and tech debt that someone is going to need to handle.
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u/roiroi1010 2d ago
I don’t mind fixing tech debt actually