Early on in my career, at a large company, I encountered someone who took “codebase” a little too literally. At the time every department had their own developers, sometimes just employees who had an aptitude for computers.
This one guy established himself by making an Access database for their core business, and when the web became a thing, built a customer site. But not on it—in it. He simply served ASP pages directly from the database, inserting dynamic content in queries. When I was asked to help improve their terrible design, I was forced to untangle that unholy mess of queries, ASP (new to me) and HTML. It was easiest to write all the HTML and insert their ASP right before I sent the files back (because I wasn’t given access to their DB/web server). Thinking “I could do better than this” got me into programming.
He was a Microsoft-everything head. Finally went too far when he presented a new web interface starring a Clippy-like parrot using Microsoft’s DirectX avatar API. The executives were unimpressed and then I noted that 20% of our customers couldn’t use his site. (I probably still had a “best viewed with IE” badge on the main site, lol)
This one guy established himself by making an Access database for their core business, and when the web became a thing, built a customer site. But not on it—in it. He simply served ASP pages directly from the database, inserting dynamic content in queries. When I was asked to help improve their terrible design, I was forced to untangle that unholy mess of queries, ASP (new to me) and HTML. It was easiest to write all the HTML and insert their ASP right before I sent the files back (because I wasn’t given access to their DB/web server). Thinking “I could do better than this” got me into programming.
He was a Microsoft-everything head. Finally went too far when he presented a new web interface starring a Clippy-like parrot using Microsoft’s DirectX avatar API. The executives were unimpressed and then I noted that 20% of our customers couldn’t use his site. (I probably still had a “best viewed with IE” badge on the main site, lol)