Also, the previous engineer was me.
this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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As the sole programmer of a certain project, I often leave rant comment on what the previous programmer was thinking.
I wrote code today I know I will have to touch in 2 weeks. I'm already dreading it. that shits a mess.
especially your own code.
"This is obvious" I said. "Surely I won't need to comment this," I said.
The worst part is when I leave comments and still wonder wtf I was thinking.
god, this code is awful. Who wrote this?
git blame
Oh
Past me was a moron sometimes.
Still am. But I used to too
I love that they called it "blame" lol. They knew what it would be used for.
Subversion tried to call it "annotate", but that didn't stick ;)
Not sure if was there from the beginning but it was originally developed by Linus Torvalds and he can be quite harsh to the Linux contributors.
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That exact chain of events happened to me at my last job and I audibly laughed realising it was my own code. To my own credit though, it was a file I had written four years prior which at that point was more than half my whole career in the past
If you aren’t ashamed of your work a year ago, you’re stagnating!
Been writing the same software for 20+ years now, don't even need git blame to figure out what asshole wrote this shit.
Why is it always me? Haha
Yup there are certain patterns that I can just tell
These days I see so much AI slop that my reaction when I see code I hand-wrote myself is "hey, that's pretty good".
My team's code is great, but we use a lot of shared code written by other teams, with varying levels of quality.
Sometimes you don't even recognize your own trash, 6 weeks later.
I mean, admitting you have a problem is the first step to a solution…
Oh, man. Can you tell what the second step is? I'd really like to learn that.
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I go back and look at my old code and find it clear and beautiful, easy to understand, a pleasure to read. "Ah yes," I'll say to myself, "that approach was clever and elegant. Gosh, past me was pretty smart!"
I like to appreciate it in this manner. Because that way, for a moment at least, I can forget about how it doesn't actually work.
I love when someone opens a bug in my code and I get to "how the hell did this ever work?"
But it would work beautifully, if it would work.
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I don't think you have to be a software engineer to understand that people do shit half-assed.
Electrical engineer: “what was that other guy thinking?”
Software engineer: “What was I thinking?” (It’s code from last night)
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I watched a team invent a new language to get around updating some eccentric code.
They could have sat down and commented it and made their changes
They could have refactored what was there.
They could have scrapped it and wrote fresh
Instead, they designed an entire natural language system so that non-programmers who were writing in XML could just write in English.
They ended up making so many required keywords as helpers that the non-programmers kept using the old system because the XML was easier for them work with.
Note: wasn't my code, wasn't my dept, when I heard the plan I went to check it out, the old system was functional but like C- work at best. At some point, they wrote a compiler for the new system.
inventing a new language is almost never the right solution. there was a guy at my last job who tried to do this pretty much every time he ran into a problem with some shitty legacy software he had to work with. rather than take the time to fix it to do what he needed, he took ten times longer to slap another layer of custom bullshit on top of it. ultimately it came down to him being a really shitty engineer too afraid to change existing code, too lazy to do his due diligence, just clever enough to implement a shitty workaround, but not clever enough to realize how shitty it was. everything he made barely worked, was way overcomplicated, and no one else even wanted to try to learn his arcane bullshit syntax.
We do all look at code, get immediately annoyed that it doesn't just make sense. most of us at least have the wherewithal to stick with it and work on the engine as it sits :)
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Electricians are a rather self-impressed bunch in my experience, like I would rather drink with a couple plumbers than electricians.
Electricians think their way is the only way. Get three electricians together and you'll get four ways of running the conduit, and a six hour argument. Electricians are constantly upset because "those bastards in HVAC put the ductwork in my way". There are three types of screw an electrician will run into in the field, which is why the average electrician owns forty-seven screwdrivers.
Plumbers only need to know three things:
- Poop rolls downhill
- Payday is Friday
- Don't chew your fingernails
Oh, and if you want to piss off a pipe fitter, call them a plumber
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