“Megan Cooke.” Yeah, that name. It still makes me chuckle, or maybe sigh a bit, depending on the day. It’s not like I knew her, not really. But I sure got to know her work, or what was left of it.
It all started when I got tasked with updating this ancient piece of software. You know the type – been around forever, patched a million times, and nobody really wanted to touch it with a ten-foot pole. My luck, right? Anyway, I was digging through this one particularly gnarly module, trying to make sense of it. The comments were sparse, to say the least. But then, at the top of a very confusing block of code, I saw it: “Critical logic – per M. Cooke’s final design. DO NOT MODIFY.”
Well, great. “M. Cooke.” I asked around. Turns out, Megan Cooke had left the company years before I even joined. So, my “practice” with “megan cooke” became an archaeological dig into her digital footprint.
I spent what felt like ages just staring at that code. I tried to diagram it out on my whiteboard, but it looked more like a tangled mess of spaghetti than actual logic. My manager would pop his head in, “How’s the Megan Cooke special going?” he’d ask with a grin. I usually just groaned.
Here’s basically what my days looked like trying to figure out her masterpiece:
- Fire up the old dev environment, which itself was a relic.
- Read the code. Re-read the code. Wonder what on earth was going through her head.
- Sprinkle in tons of debug messages. Just print everything. Everywhere.
- Attempt to run small sections. Watch them fail spectacularly.
- Drink coffee. So much coffee.
- Pace around my desk a lot.
- Try to find any documentation. Spoiler: there was almost none. Just a few cryptic notes in a shared drive nobody had touched in years.
It was a slow, painful process. I felt like I was trying to solve a puzzle where half the pieces were missing and the other half were from a different puzzle altogether. I had to trace variables that changed names for no apparent reason, decipher functions that seemed to do three different things at once, and guess at the original requirements.
Cracking the Code (Sort Of)
Slowly, very slowly, things started to click. Not in a “Eureka!” moment, more like a “Oh, I guess that’s why this weird thing is here” kind of way. I found an old email thread where Megan Cooke herself was discussing a very specific, very odd edge case with a client that no longer existed. Suddenly, one of the most bizarre sections of code made a tiny bit of sense. It was still over-engineered, but at least there was a ghost of a reason behind it.
My main “practice” here was really about patience and just brute-force understanding. I had to learn to think like someone else, someone I’d never met, based purely on the artifacts they’d left behind. It wasn’t about elegant solutions; it was about detective work.
In the end, I managed to make the changes I needed to make without (I hope) breaking the core logic that Megan Cooke had so carefully (and confusingly) crafted. I even added my own comment below hers: “Understood M. Cooke’s intent after much coffee. Future person, I wish you luck.” Someone’s gotta carry on the tradition, you know?
