the first one was a mumps project, with cache. it was written by a competent developer, but he was using it as a way to learn mumps to forward his career in the health care industry. the issues were more specific to mumps itself, while trying to maintain and add features (there are thousands of articles online about issues in mumps, if you want to fully understand the struggle). it was eventually rewritten, with tests, and supported by a small team.
the second was for the same company, but a very different developer. this developer despised version control, and considered foxpro the "one true language", even after Microsoft itself had abandoned it. the codebase was riddled with bugs, fixed in various versions deployed for various customers, so there were a ton of misc bugs and "features" strewn throughout 20-30 "codebases", but no comments, short variable names, and poor practices. from what I could tell, the developer had been drunk for most of the development and any changes, and thus the original was used as a template for features and discarded as quickly as a simple web app could be written and tested.
otherwise, the codebases that I have have inherited have been at least understandable, but sometimes best practices weren't used, or too "clever" of solutions were chosen instead of making larger needed codebase changes which meant much more difficult code to maintain, but nothing has come close to those two.
the first one was a mumps project, with cache. it was written by a competent developer, but he was using it as a way to learn mumps to forward his career in the health care industry. the issues were more specific to mumps itself, while trying to maintain and add features (there are thousands of articles online about issues in mumps, if you want to fully understand the struggle). it was eventually rewritten, with tests, and supported by a small team.
the second was for the same company, but a very different developer. this developer despised version control, and considered foxpro the "one true language", even after Microsoft itself had abandoned it. the codebase was riddled with bugs, fixed in various versions deployed for various customers, so there were a ton of misc bugs and "features" strewn throughout 20-30 "codebases", but no comments, short variable names, and poor practices. from what I could tell, the developer had been drunk for most of the development and any changes, and thus the original was used as a template for features and discarded as quickly as a simple web app could be written and tested.
otherwise, the codebases that I have have inherited have been at least understandable, but sometimes best practices weren't used, or too "clever" of solutions were chosen instead of making larger needed codebase changes which meant much more difficult code to maintain, but nothing has come close to those two.