I too have had the pleasure of working on a project that had tens of microservices without defined interfaces, sharing a database (and occasionally reaching into other service’s tables directly) with hundreds of thousands of lines of code and an Angular SPA. Oh and about a dozen poorly-written tests in total.
It was obviously a complete trainwreck, but it worked enough to convince multiple executives at different companies to actually pay for this crap. Sure it went down every week and was leaking data left and right, but it looked legit.
I clearly don’t appreciate the architecture or the reliability of it, but the tenacity of the people able to build such a monstrosity day in and day out, somehow wrangling it into shape against all odds. That’s the sort of mental willpower I wish I had.
Arrogance is a hell of a drug. The Dereks I met were all, in their own way, insufferably arrogant. Probably to pave over insecurities, but I don't really care as to the causative mechanism. The effect in each case was that they are so full of themselves, that they displayed an inexhaustible energy in maintaining and defending their Rube Goldberg shitfests.
It was obviously a complete trainwreck, but it worked enough to convince multiple executives at different companies to actually pay for this crap. Sure it went down every week and was leaking data left and right, but it looked legit.
I clearly don’t appreciate the architecture or the reliability of it, but the tenacity of the people able to build such a monstrosity day in and day out, somehow wrangling it into shape against all odds. That’s the sort of mental willpower I wish I had.