Good for you. Magical moments in careers are hard to find in my experience but they are so satisfying when you get there.
Glad whomever was over this didnt just drop the "dont rewrite" joel spolsky article and fight making it happen.
Glad whomever was over this didnt just drop the "dont rewrite" joel spolsky article and fight making it happen.
But the original code was a mess of matlab spaghetti, they couldn't find a way to hire for that. Not to mention turning it into a web service was already a big hack of java parsing a raw dump of matlab datastructures that nobody dared to touch.
I had to read the matlab code, and it tooks hours to decypher a few lines. Plus the language doesn't have great debugging and error handling capabilities and the tooling is quite terrible.
So rewriting to python won, and for once, I must say it was a good call.
The balance is somewhere in the middle, it's valuable advice for what can go wrong when you don't think through the implications of the decision making process, understand how and why the system works the way it does, and what risks exist for what can go wrong with a big redesign. But like anything, if the risks are understood, then those risks can be accepted, mitigated, or rejected if appropriate, or provide guidance on why the redesign investment isn't worth the associated risks.