[withinboredom]

For awhile there, I was “the second opinion” if you outsourced a project. You’d hire people like me to tell you if it really would take 100 man hours to make photo uploads faster, or did they really patch a security issue, etc. It was pretty neat to read so much closed source code. But more than once, the developer would send obfuscated code and claim that it was how they worked on it. Only once did someone say, “oops, here’s the right version”.

Those projects taught me how important naming is, more than anything. Some people like to say that you don’t need names.

I’ll be the first to say that they’re probably right (considering the code executes) but damn does it make life easier when things are named well... and less expensive for everyone.

[telchar]

I'm curious, how would they obfuscate code and how could you tell?

[withinboredom]

Imagine every variable, class, file, and method name being gibberish with no comments. Also, no white space devs usually use to group related functionality in a method. You have to not only figure out what the heck is going on, but also why. It’s very difficult to figure out at first.

A normal code base has some (not always descriptive) names. But it’s at least useful for context.

[telchar]

Oh yeah, that's some pretty clear obfuscation. It sounds like a PITA to work with code like that.