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When Rewriting an App Actually Makes Sense
vlangber writes "Joel Spolsky wrote a famous blog post back in 2000 called 'Things You Should Never Do, Part I,' where he wrote the following: '[T]he single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.' Here is a story about a software company that decided to rewrite their application from scratch, and their experiences from that process."
I am about half way through the article in the second link, and it is really interesting, and informative. :>
Maybe not news, but it is worth your time (or at least mine).
Actually, from what I got from the article it seems they also felt that the basic design of the original version of application just wasn't good enough, that it was in fact seriously lacking and that a gradual rewrite would take longer and not accomplish what they wanted (to clean up and future-proof their application).
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Thanks for noticing..
.Net, a literal control is created for that data. Strangely Microsoft decided to make EnableViewState enabled by default for automatically created controls. The reason the viewstate is so big on that page is because I forgot to put the above snippet in a Literal control with viewstate enabled:
The blog module uses templated controls. When you bind data to a templated control, all that data get's stuffed into the viewstate as default. To fetch the comment content, the template for a comment has this snippet:
<%# Container.CommentContent %>
As default in
<asp:Literal runat="server" ID="litBlogCommentContent" EnableViewState="false" Text=""></asp:Literal>
I usually check the size of the viewstate, but none of the blogposts I checked had any comments, so I didn't catch it when we created the site. I'll update it as soon as traffic slows down a bit.
dude, THIS is the regex to validate an email address: http://www.ex-parrot.com/pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html
I quite like the way that the article claims that it shows an exception to Spolsky's rule, but actually isn't at all: they claim to have started off as a successful CMS company with "big name" clients, embarked on a rewrite that took them off the market for two years and ended up as a tiny player with "more than two hundred web projects [...] in Norway".
As far as I can tell this is a project that went exactly the way Spolsky predicted: they had a decent product, they embarked on a rewrite that took longer than they expected and they lost the market by doing it.
Dinky company, perhaps, but quite successful at a personal level. In less than ten years, Joel took his company from zero to seven million dollars per year by my accounting.
http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html
$700 per employee in the original office
http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/29.html
"built for 18 employees" = about $12,600/month
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080601/how-hard-could-it-be-adventures-in-office-space.html
"When we moved into our current offices, our rent had been equal to 15 percent of revenue, which was high. But the company grew, and today our rent is only about 2 percent of revenue."
So revenue was $84,000/mo ($1,008,000/yr) and is now about $7,500,000/year.
So he's not a complete waste of space. And he may not be God but that doesn't mean he's never right and/or never worth listening to. READ THE F ARTICLE about rewrites--plenty of Slashdotters (you included) have been here long enough to know that at least, his example about Netscape/Mozilla is 100% accurate. They lost YEARS because they chose to rewrite everything.
And judging by the comments here, I think a lot of people are reading the title and thinking he's saying "never make any changes." That is 10000% NOT what he is saying. He's saying "never throw away 100% of your code and start over from scratch." If you actually read his original article (I know, I'm new here) you'll see a lot of really good points.
Joel isn't God, but he isn't just some stumbling moron either. There IS a continuum between those two extremes, you know.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.