Alright, let me tell you about this thing we had, called “j rueben”. Sounds kinda like a sandwich, right? I wish it was that simple. This “j rueben” was an old piece of software, a real dinosaur, that was somehow still kicking around when I joined.
My first real taste of it was when they asked me to pull some specific data. Easy peasy, I thought. Oh boy, was I wrong. This wasn’t just about running a simple query. No, sir. “j rueben” had its own… let’s call them “quirks”.
The Deep Dive into “j rueben”
So, I started digging. First off, documentation? Forget it. Whatever existed was probably written on a stone tablet and lost to time. I had to basically reverse-engineer half the thing just to figure out where the data I needed might even live. I spent days, I tell you, just staring at its ancient code, if you could even call it that. It was like looking at spaghetti, but if the spaghetti was also on fire.
Here’s what I was up against:
- No clear structure: Data seemed to be scattered everywhere, with no rhyme or reason.
- Weird logic: The way it processed things made no sense. It was like someone built it on a Friday afternoon after a very long lunch.
- Super slow: Trying to get anything out of it felt like watching paint dry. In slow motion.
- Prone to crashing: You’d be halfway through something, and poof! Gone. Start all over again.
I remember talking to some of the older guys, and they’d just chuckle and say, “Ah, j rueben. Good luck!” That’s when you know you’re in for a treat. They all had their own horror stories. One guy told me he lost a week’s worth of work once because “j rueben” just decided to eat his files. Yikes.
To get this supposedly simple data, I had to:
- First, figure out which of its twenty-something outdated modules might contain the info.
- Then, I had to write a series of small, careful scripts to poke at it, because asking for too much at once would just make it fall over.
- I had to run these scripts at like 3 AM, when no one else was using the system, just to give it a fighting chance.
- And then, I had to manually check everything because you just couldn’t trust what “j rueben” gave you. Never trust j rueben. That became my mantra.
It took me almost two weeks to get that “simple” data extract. Two weeks! For something that should have taken a couple of hours, tops, on a modern system. I felt like I’d wrestled a bear and barely won.
Eventually, they started a project to replace “j rueben”. Hallelujah! I wasn’t directly on that replacement team, but you bet I cheered them on from the sidelines. The day they finally switched it off, I think I heard a collective sigh of relief echo through the entire office. We probably should have thrown a party. Good riddance, “j rueben”. You taught me a lot about patience, mostly because I had no other choice.
