[hga]

Dive into someone else's imperfect at best code and make it work. After finishing the final project for my 2nd programming class, I helped someone else make their's work. In the context of what could run on a PDP-11/70 running Version 6 UNIX™ with 24x80 CRT terminals, it was rather neat, a semi-real time air traffic control simulator game, with planes coming from the upper corners and crossing paths as they went down to the catercornered runway.

Great idea, better than mine, but the code was awful, had three global state variables X, XX, and XXX ... plus U, UU, and UUU for the UFOs he'd added to make the game more fun ^_^.

I helped him reduce the complexity by removing the UFOs (it was still quite challenging enough), and getting it to work in general. This prepared me for the many future jobs I took working on the code bases of others (one of which, for example, taught me red-black trees for real), and which soon enough led to the extremes of software archaeology when you can't even ask anyone about the code.

Not that you necessarily want to seek out such work, it's hard and often thankless, but at its best it's also what paying down technical debt is about. And code you've written long ago can also be rather foreign when you come back to it....