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A customer uses software developed by a 45-year-old developer. It has been in production for over 10 years, the code is theirs, and the developer is paid to write and maintain it. In my opinion, this approach is correct, as it gives my client the freedom to use their own code. The program is written in C and works well, never having caused any particular issues, although, in my opinion, it’s quite heavy for what it actually needs to do.

Yesterday afternoon, I was at this client’s for an emergency (which I will describe later), and since I was there, we tried to run it on FreeBSD, but it didn’t work. The client asked me to take a look at the code, hoping I could figure out what was wrong. Despite not doing much development, I realized the issue was that the program was trying to access files on static Debian paths, and once fixed, everything worked fine.

However, I noticed a detail: at the start, it parses a configuration file (old-school, not json) to look for values set to "ON" and "OFF". The parsing happens on characters, but in the end, it doesn't matter much since it’s done only when the program launches. I noticed that a series of ints are defined, where ON is set to "1" and OFF to "0".

Out of curiosity (I imagine the developer might have labeled me as a troublemaker), I asked why they hadn’t used bools, and if a different numeric value was expected. He replied, irritated, that it didn’t make sense to use bools just to save "a few bytes". After taking a closer look at the code, I realized how it wasn’t remotely optimized, resulting in "monstrous" computational complexities compared to the simple operations needed. Of course, I said nothing, but clearly, the developer noticed my expression. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I’m very expressive. He started saying that hardware is advancing, the world is advancing, and that the "obsession" with optimization was pointless. I didn’t respond. The client wasn’t around, and I had no intention of sharing my thoughts on the code with him.

Back in the office, the client called and asked why the developer had complained that "I criticized the code," and what I thought about it. I simply replied that, in my opinion, and from what little I had seen, the code seemed fine; I had only asked questions about some implementation choices. Everything was fine, everything was resolved - the developer isn’t a bad person, just a little sensitive.

My takeaway here: the mini-PC I now have at home consumes half the power of the previous one, has extremely superior performance, and opens up new possibilities. What’s the point of creating better hardware if we "eat up" the advantage by filling the software with inefficiencies?

#Dev #IT #SysAdmin #Efficiency

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