If you postpone technical debt it’ll bite you
Even If it is not yours
An exciting contract
Back in 2013, an agency hired our company to create a game for Microsoft. They’d showcase their new and shiny Surface tablet and use the game in conferences around the US, like the big San Diego Comic-Con International event.
Our client said, “The backend is done. We only want you guys to build a 3D UI with WebGL.” It was a complex multiplayer game. We worked hard for months and created an outstanding game UI with state-of-the-art technology.
A rotten core
Unfortunately, the backend we inherited and weren’t allowed to modify had one of the worst PHP code we’d ever seen. It was a humongous monolithic piece of code with no tests, terrible database design, and terrible SQL generated by terrible practices. For example, we could easily do SQL injection on almost every web service. Anyway, it was not about the language, but about the engineering practices. Never blame a programming language for your lack of skills.
We insisted that we had to rebuild the whole thing. But our client stayed firm…
