| I joined a small SaaS company when it was 15 years old, in the role of developer. I was the third developer on the team. I dragged them, kicking and screaming, away from CVS into git for source control. I did a LOT of documentation of their ancient and honorable :-) SQL schema. I converted a lot of old legacy code to more modern languages. I converted a lot of old legacy SQL embedded in their code to use prepared statements and stored procedures, and developed a tiny little framework to make it easy for other developers to do the same. I came in early one summer morning and washed the windows in the office. Seriously. They hadn't been washed for 15 years, and were disgusting. I helped talk them into replacing their low end home brew bug tracking system. I pushed, hard, to get them to gradually discontinue using FreeBSD in favor of standardized Linux cloud distros. I developed a way for sales, dev, and ops to communicate to do capacity planning BEFORE bringing on new gigantic enterprise customers, not after. I failed to get them to adopt CI/CD. I retired. My working principle: always work myself out of any job. Do all my work so somebody else can take it over. |