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by mattlondon 1407 days ago
Not someone else's code but I had the strange experience recently of revisiting an old project of mine (DNS server written in typescript + deno) and being intimidated by the quality of my own code.

I had those familiar feelings of "I could never write code like this" or "I'd never have thought to do it like that!" or "This person must really know their shit". Turns out it was me all along and I'd just forgotten I'd done it all.

Grokking it and modifying it after 2-something years was actually simple as I'd left good comments, abstractions, and even reasonable unit test coverage (even integrated with GitHub actions that run on push) so changes were a breeze.

There has to be a life lesson there somewhere.

3 comments

revisiting an old project of mine (DNS server written in typescript + deno)

Can it really be called old considering the very modern tech stack?

Deno initial release was 4 years ago, in tech that's ancient, right? :)
I've had that experience. I honestly sometimes worry I've peaked and am getting less good at figuring out how to compose good code as my brain ages.

I think I'm actually getting better at it, at least in some ways... but not totally sure there aren't others I'm not quite as brilliant.

if age is greater then mid-30s then yes, else no.
would love to look at it and possibly learn something. Is it open source?