Yes, it was a mega legacy codebase written by a single person over the span of a decade and was extremely “job secured”. It had Perl scripts that would system call to php scripts that would in turn do a curl request to another http perl script that would system call another php script that would output HTML, which then would get parsed by the calling scripts several ways. That was just one place. There were lots and lots of these problems.
Our team was handed the project to rewrite it. It was a secret project and we were very careful. We didn’t want to spook the original developer.
It was a lot of hair pulling and tracking of the code. Lots of gruelling work.
Oh I inherited a similar Perl/php/shell script mess a few years ago. A fun twist was that the codebase started off as a commercial groovy/grails application, and had this Frankenstein thing surgically attached, reading and writing to the same database tables.
Would love to know what happened once you were done, especially was the original developer still around and did they have a funny panic mode upon realizing the job security rug had been pulled out from under them?
Eventually the dev got a whiff of it. He was let go abc offered, I’m guessing, a lofty consulting position for a year. This was the exact scenario they were trying to avoid, but at least we pushed it back to as far as we could.
The project eventually went from horrible to interesting once all of the legacy was dealt with.
Our team was handed the project to rewrite it. It was a secret project and we were very careful. We didn’t want to spook the original developer.
It was a lot of hair pulling and tracking of the code. Lots of gruelling work.