So we did version 2.0. This was an attempt to add some of the most obviously needed features. While David worked on version 2.0 we honestly didn’t think it was worth that much effort, so he tended to do things in what you might call an “expedient” fashion rather than, say, an “elegant” fashion. Certain, ahem, design issues in the original code were allowed to fester. There were two complete sets of nearly identical code for drawing the main bug-editing page. SQL statements were scattered throughout the HTML hither and yon, to and fro, pho and ton. Our HTML was creaky and designed for those ancient browsers that were so buggy they could crash loading about:blank.
Yeah, it worked brilliantly, we’ve been at zero known bugs for a while now. But inside, the code was, to use the technical term, a “big mess.” Adding new features was a hemorrhoid. To add one field to the central bug table would probably require 50 modifications, and you’d still be finding places you forgot to modify long after you bought your first family carplane for those weekend trips to your beach house on Mars.
| Author | Joel Spolsky |
| Work | Rub a dub dub |