The Complexinator

Back when I worked at the Department of State, I created an imaginary machine called The Complexinator. This machine could take in anything - a problem, a program, an idea, etc... - as long and whatever was being passed in was simple and understandable. The Complexinator would then churn and chug...typically emitting clouds of noxious smoke...and then return to you an extremely complex morass of indecipherable results - thus your input was Complexinated using the process of Complexination.

The purpose, of course, was to teach more novice developers and business analysts the value of keeping things simple...

Little did I know that Mr. DT got a hold of my Complexinator behind my back, increased the Complexination process by a magnitude of absurdity, and used it on our proof of concept.

Never have I seen such a pit of intertwined, over-engineered, simply frustrating code as I see when I look at what was built. I will admit that I am a hack - I typically only write code sufficient to complete a given task and I never try to write "reusable code" or code frameworks. To me they are simply wastes of time as everything changes too much to make those approaches worth the effort.

Mr. DT somehow started to created a framework several times, stopped, started on another framework, etc... And then he left them all in the solution and is using bits and pieces from each.

When I write code and there is a bug, I immediately know where that issue originates - I might not know how to fix the problem but it usually does not take very long. This project? It can take DAYS just to figure out where an issue originates and fixing one issue typically results in a series of systemic bugs that can take weeks to resolve. Case in point, we have been trying to get images to paint on a screen for 3 weeks. Most of the issues have been resolved now - total UI bug count - 4. Total systemic issues from those 4 fixes - endless.

If I had been Really Smart, I would have also developer the Decomplexinator to decomplexinate this mess...oh well...time to dive back down the rabbit hole...