A Family that Codes Together

My wife, Janice, and I work for the same company. In fact we work for the same boss. It has its ups and downs. But if we didn’t work together, situations like these would never happen:

Janice was working on a Perl script that handles integrating Active Directory and MajorDomo. It was buggy and confusing and overall not well written. Janice was struggling with the parts that were crappy, basically trying to grok the ungrokable, and she calls me over.

Janice: Can you tell me what this section of code does:

## Im not really sure why I did this. It works so back off!
        my $max = $mesg->count;
              for($i = 0 ; $i < $max ; $i++) {
              my $entry = $mesg->entry($i);
                foreach my $attr ($entry->attributes) {
                      $dn=$entry->get_value($attr)  }
          }

Me: No.

Janice: Why not?

Me: I didn’t understand it when I wrote it. What makes you think I understand it now?

You see, I’ve worked for our current department on and off for the past 6 years. My first past through the group was doing Exchange and Windows Domain systems administration. I managed the upgrade from NT4 to Windows 2000 and Active Directory. I wrote the first batches of code that we used to integrate Active Directory and our legacy systems. That meant Perl. I learned it sort by accident back in the day, and at my height of ability I was never one of those guys who would write twenty lines of function in one line.

Which brings us back to this section of code; I wrote it in my first Active Directory LDAP Perl to CSO script. It was copy and pasted by another developer, and reused again. Until my wife had to deal with it… six years after I wrote it.

Sorry, hon.