I was responsible for a critical software project written by non-programmers a decade ago.

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The project with a single 11,000-line code file. The responsibility of maintaining the project had been bounced from team to team over the years. The code followed a rough pattern of fetch some data about the user, check if some conditions are met, then do some action which repeated a thousand or so times.

The project with a single 11,000-line code file

<p>the “if it works don’t fix it” rule went too far.</p>


<p>We’ve all been there. Where I currently work, I got tasked to port a project from Perl to PHP.
The entire project as a collection of 5-6 perl files, where one of them was the entire business logic with 8K lines of nearly-undecipherable code. I had never touched a Perl code before and, just like you, haven’t touched since I finished porting it.
Everything runs smoothly now, and its properly documented, properly commented and more people are aware of how it works.</p>
