[codingdave]

> tonnes of really bad code other clueless newbies like myself had written...

When I first looked at MUD code, I had not yet learned to code. I thought that the folks who wrote the code must be so smart, and felt intimidated by it. Fast forward a few decades, and I recently looked at MUD code again. I spent a week porting ROT 1.4 to a node server, mostly just as a personal coding exercise, and found myself realizing just how bad that code actually was.

Yet we need to be fair. As you said, it was written by newbies, mostly students. It was written before modern tech stacks, before modern practices. And despite all the critique we could throw at it... it worked. It stills works. It was shared, copied, modified, and kept on working for many people, over many years. And it definitely inspired people to learn and try new things.

[scbrg]

Absolutely! Every single line (my own included) was truly a work of passion. We were all there coding because we loved the game, and wanted to make it even better (although opinions varied, of course, on exactly what would make it better). We all did our best, and we all just wanted things to be (even more) awesome.

We didn't even have any version control. Everybody was logged in, editing the same files over ftp, and reloaded the code on the running instance. It was chaotic and hilarious. I eventually ended up in charge of the "mudlib" (essentially the standard library). I learned so much from reading, debugging and trying to improve that code and, eventually, being a sort of mentor to a slightly younger batch of newbies.

I've never been a guru when it comes to clever algorithms, and I'm pretty shit at math, so I've had to find some other role fit on a team. I believe my main strength to this day is debugging weird and messy code, and much of the reason for that is the years I spent trying to get that wonderful mess of a code base to work.