Not long ago, I visited some folks with whom I had worked at a large Insurance company. My job there was to work as a deployment engineer in a large group of developers. It was good to sit and have a beer and visit with them, as it had been a couple of years. As the beers flowed and the hours dwindled toward bar time, we began to reminisce about tech issues, apps, code, politics...etc.. . I was astounded to hear that the Perl code I wrote to bridge between CVS and an expensive, complex proprietary SCM application was still being used, unchanged!

This was/is not pretty code! I have seen good code writing, and know very well that what I do would not be described as such. It was never intended to be much more that an interim tool that I and a couple of others could use while the "real" tool was being written in Java, incorporating all sorts of neat things from Maven to God only knows what else.

As I sat there, beer in hand, mouth hanging open in surprise, my former co-worker explained to me that the "real" tool never did come about, and the goofy ugly code I wrote was and is being used still, everywhere in that company!

Of that I am proud. It ain't pretty, but it works. And what I am most proud of is that it works for others as well as it did for me. Many who use it are far better programmers than I will ever be. But, By God!... they like it!

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