Alright, let’s talk about that whole “Mary Lou Lane” endeavor. It sounds kinda sweet and innocent, doesn’t it? Well, let me tell you, working on it was anything but a gentle stroll down a country lane. It was more like hacking through a jungle with a butter knife.
You see, “Mary Lou Lane” wasn’t a person, or a place, not really. It was the codename for this ancient internal dashboard system we had. And when I say ancient, I mean ancient. It was a complete Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together over years by folks who probably left the company before I even knew what a keyboard was. We’re talking:
- A front-end that looked like it was designed in 1998, probably because it was.
- A backend that was a bizarre mix of uncommented Perl scripts and some really obscure Java applets that only ran on specific, outdated browser versions.
- And the database? Oh, the database was a legend. Nobody quite knew how it was structured, or why certain tables were named the way they were. It was like an archaeological dig every time you needed to pull some data.
Trying to get anything done with “Mary Lou Lane” was a nightmare. Need a new report? That’ll be three weeks, and it might crash the whole system. Want to update an existing feature? Good luck figuring out which of the tangled wires to snip, metaphorically speaking. Even basic stuff, stuff that should have been simple, turned into a massive headache. There was no documentation to speak of, just whispers and rumors passed down from one poor soul to the next.
So, how did I get saddled with this mess?
That’s a bit of a story. It all happened after this big “restructuring” at my old place. You know the type, where they shuffle everyone around and call it “synergy” or “optimizing resources.” Well, I got “optimized” right onto the “Mary Lou Lane” project. Most of the folks who had even a vague idea of how it worked had conveniently found themselves on newer, shinier projects. Or they just vanished into other departments.
It felt a lot like this one time, years ago, when I was working at this tiny startup. We were all wearing multiple hats, which is fine, but then the lead developer for our main product just up and quit. No notice, just gone. And guess who got to pick up the pieces of his half-finished, barely documented code? Yep, yours truly. I was pulling my hair out for months trying to make sense of it, all while the boss was breathing down my neck about deadlines.
So, when “Mary Lou Lane” landed in my lap, it was like déjà vu. Nobody wanted to touch it with a ten-foot pole. It was the kind of project that just sits there, slowly decaying, until someone new and unsuspecting comes along. That someone was me. I spent a good chunk of time just trying to map out what connected to what, like some kind of digital detective. Honestly, I think parts of “Mary Lou Lane” are still running somewhere in the background, chugging along, waiting for the next unlucky person to stumble upon them.
