Today is one of those days when I pretty much spent the entire day going through code.

My day job is kind of split between development and administrative work, so it goes back and forth what I spend my time on from one day to another. In addition to implementing some new functionality that we’re working on right now, I also spied an opportunity to clean up a bunch of the older code and try to standardize things a bit, so that’s been pretty much my entire day! 😯

In a way I’ve been a little spoiled the last couple of years because for the most part I’ve done all of the development work needed for my department by myself. On one hand, it’s a ton of extra work and one of the HUGE reasons that we’re still behind today, but it also allows you some liberties in being the only person touching the codebase where you tend to get away with things like not commenting your code properly or sometimes just throwing things together haphazardly because you’re in such a rush to get on to the next task…

Yet truth be told over a span of say the last five years, about half a dozen developers who’ve come and gone have laid their hands on this code in one way or another, so it’s started to become painfully obvious how much we really needed some standardization. Mostly simple stuff – formatting, using common names for variables and columns, commenting structure – but it just takes time to go through each procedure one by one to groom everything the way I want it today.

…and then having to go through everything all over again when I find a new tweak that I decide I really want done for everything I’ve already touched!

I keep telling myself that by the end of the year when all of the big projects my team is working on are completed, it’s going to be really nice and all of the effort will be well worth it … but right now I’d just be happy to finish the last dozen procedures left on my list without coming across yet another reason to go back and revisit the entire lot all over again… 😛