Alright, let me tell you about this thing we had, “d’sean”. Nobody really remembers where the name came from. Probably some old inside joke that stuck. What it was, though, was our ancient reporting system. And man, it was a nightmare.
Every single time I needed to pull some numbers, which was often, it felt like I was gearing up for a fight. You’d click a button, and then just… sit there. Staring at that little spinning icon, wondering if it would ever finish or just crash the whole browser. Most of the time, it was a coin toss.
So, one rainy Tuesday, I just had enough. I remember thinking, “That’s it. I’m going to figure out at least a tiny piece of this d’sean puzzle. Or I’m gonna lose my mind.” It wasn’t like I had a grand plan, more like a desperate move.
First thing I did was try to run one of the simpler reports. The “daily summary” or something. Click. Wait. Coffee break. Still waiting. The little spinner just kept spinning, mocking me. Classic d’sean.
I figured, okay, this has got to be some monster query hitting the database, right? So, I started trying to find the logs. That itself was an adventure. Found a bunch of cryptic files, full of error messages that looked like they hadn’t been checked since the system was first hacked together. Nobody seemed to care.
I spent a couple of days just trying to follow the trail for that one single report. I even hunted down a couple of the senior guys, the ones who were around when “d’sean” was born. Their advice? Mostly shrugs and comments like, “Oh yeah, d’sean’s always been a bit slow.” Super helpful, thanks.
So, I got out my trusty whiteboard and started drawing. Trying to map out how the data was supposed to flow for this report. Boxes, arrows, scribbled notes. After a while, it looked like something a conspiracy theorist would draw in his basement. A total mess, but slowly, a tiny part started to make a bit of sense.
There was this one particular bit, a kind of data collector module, let’s call it the “gatherer.” And it seemed like this gatherer was trying to do everything. It would pull massive amounts of raw data, then try to sort and filter it all in the application’s memory. For every single report request! No wonder it choked.
I thought, what if I could just get this gatherer to be a bit smarter? Maybe tell it to ask the database to do some of the filtering before it grabbed all that data. It seemed like a long shot. I mean, I couldn’t rewrite d’sean. No way anyone would approve the time for that beast. But this one module, maybe I could poke it a bit.
So, I rolled up my sleeves. Opened up my code editor. I didn’t touch d’sean directly at first. Nope. I made a small, separate script to test my idea. Took a sample of the data, ran my modified logic against it. And guess what? It was actually faster! Not lightning fast, but noticeably quicker.
Then came the scary part. Trying to carefully weave this little change into the actual “d’sean” code without blowing up the whole thing. I set up a test environment, a copy of d’sean. And I started experimenting. Broke it a few times, not gonna lie. Had to quickly roll back my changes, figure out what went wrong, and try again. Lots of trial and error. Lots of coffee.
Finally, after what felt like ages, I got a small improvement working for that one specific report I was targeting. It wasn’t a complete overhaul, not by a long shot. But it took the report generation time down from something like half an hour to maybe 5 or 10 minutes. It felt like a huge win.
The best part? People on my team actually started noticing. Someone said, “Hey, the daily report actually finished before lunch today!” That little comment made all the frustration worth it.
So yeah, “d’sean” is still mostly the same old clunky system. A real pain. But wrestling with that one small part of it taught me a lot. Sometimes you can’t fix the whole broken thing. But just chipping away at one corner, making one small part a little less terrible, can actually make a difference. And it reminded me that even the most tangled, ancient systems have some logic to them. You just have to be stubborn enough, and maybe annoyed enough, to go digging for it.
