No, but I have been the only one on the team willing and able to diagnose and fix bugs in that legacy codebase that everyone else was afraid to touch.
It probably still mostly works for what we want to use it for, so a rewrite is simply out of bounds. You just plant your face in the dirt, and start plowing ahead. You learn enough about it to get done what is needed, and get out of it as fast as you can.
Strange code isn't all that bad if you're the only one in it. And since you didn't write it in the first place, you can always blame anything that goes wrong on it being awful and brittle. And you can even get that module slander done preemptively, so that when you finally get something working, you're the conquering hero, returning home from battle with the monster. And if you break it beyond repair, you finally get to rewrite it. You can't really lose, except for the torture you undergo while you are actually wrestling with it.
Aside from terminal breakage, if it wasn't worth rewriting any year in the last 20 years, this is probably not the year, either. But sometimes you do the reverse engineering, and find that you can replace the whole crufty thing with 3 lines and a library function call somewhere in your regular code base, and now the execution step that used to take 3 hours takes 100 ms. That feels pretty good, in the moment. Less so when management just gives you a little pat on the head and says, "Well done. Run along, now."
It probably still mostly works for what we want to use it for, so a rewrite is simply out of bounds. You just plant your face in the dirt, and start plowing ahead. You learn enough about it to get done what is needed, and get out of it as fast as you can.
Strange code isn't all that bad if you're the only one in it. And since you didn't write it in the first place, you can always blame anything that goes wrong on it being awful and brittle. And you can even get that module slander done preemptively, so that when you finally get something working, you're the conquering hero, returning home from battle with the monster. And if you break it beyond repair, you finally get to rewrite it. You can't really lose, except for the torture you undergo while you are actually wrestling with it.
Aside from terminal breakage, if it wasn't worth rewriting any year in the last 20 years, this is probably not the year, either. But sometimes you do the reverse engineering, and find that you can replace the whole crufty thing with 3 lines and a library function call somewhere in your regular code base, and now the execution step that used to take 3 hours takes 100 ms. That feels pretty good, in the moment. Less so when management just gives you a little pat on the head and says, "Well done. Run along, now."