The Best Source Code I’ve Ever Seen
In 2007 I was hired as a consultant for a startup transportation software company in Warsaw to help out with a algorithm of calculating a price of service. They had a Palmtop app for this. And something went south when calcuating price between continents.
No one knew why. It was a startup with crazy version of agile approach. No documentation, no tests back then.
But until this time everything worked fine. Thus the complex algorithm was developed by a junior developer. I was introduced to him. We sat at his desk. And talked. He was worried because the continental feature was already marketed but didn’t work as expected.
He gave me a palmtop with the app. After some testing I have faced the error. The value was expected to be 7475,76 dollars but was 7376,64 dollars.
I showed it to him and he said: let me see. He took the palmtop, opened keyboard and typed ‘god mode’. A console log style window popped up with a input field. He typed list. The screen filled with sentences and values. He looked at it and said: yes, this is the error, I don’t understand why. See, everything calculates properly.
I’ve looked at the screen. These sentences with values was a step by step output of algorithm steps and values corresponding to them.
