My Co-Founder threw away 90% of the code I wrote

21 pointsimaginaryspaces17 comments

TL;DR: This is an appreciation post for all those co-founders who take our messy, hacky code, and somehow transform it into maintainable, production-ready software.

Back in October, my co-founder and I started working on an ambitious project to automate the entire machine learning lifecycle. We split our PoC into two parts: ML model generation (my part) and data generation (his part), tackling them independently. Within weeks, we had cobbled together a solution that could generate datasets from problem descriptions and then train ML models with them. Rather than getting caught up in perfection, we deployed it to AWS, exposed it as an API, and started getting user feedback.

The response was encouraging, but users consistently asked to see under the hood. Given we were working with data, open-sourcing seemed like the natural next step. While part of me wanted to immediately throw our code onto Github, my co-founder wisely suggested we take a step back, review, and refactor the critical pieces first.

Here's where it gets interesting: We decided to swap our codebases. I would review his data generation code, and he would tackle my ML model generation code. What followed was both humbling and enlightening.

His data generation code was a thing of beauty - meticulously documented, well-structured, and so clean that it took me just a couple of days to make minor tweaks for release. My code? Well... my co-founder spent over a week essentially rebuilding it from scratch while preserving the core functionality. In his typical gracious manner, he maintained the essence of what I'd built while making it actually maintainable.

Looking back, I basically threw spaghetti at the wall while my co-founder actually wrote real software. My code worked (somehow). Meanwhile, his codebase was like a well-organised library - everything in its place, properly documented, actually maintainable. Sure, we got our prototype out fast, but I'm pretty sure I owe him a few years of his life for having to deal with my "creative" approach to software engineering.

So here's to all the co-founders out there who clean up after us "move fast and break things" developers. Your dedication to code quality might not always be visible to users, but it's what transforms promising prototypes into lasting products.

View on HN

def run_code(code, timeout=3600): try: p = Process(target=exec, args=(code,)) p.start() p.join(timeout) if p.is_alive(): p.terminate() return "Timeout" return "Success" except Exception as e: return f"Failed: {str(e)}"

class ProcessExecutor(Executor): def __init__(self, execution_id: str, code: str, working_dir: Path, dataset: pd.DataFrame, timeout: int = 3600): super().__init__(code, timeout) self.working_dir = Path(working_dir).resolve() / execution_id self.working_dir.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True) self.dataset = dataset def run(self) -> ExecutionResult: start_time = time.time() code_file: Path = self.working_dir / self.code_file_name with open(code_file, "w") as f: f.write(self.code) try: process = subprocess.Popen( [sys.executable, str(code_file)], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE, cwd=str(self.working_dir), text=True, ) stdout, stderr = process.communicate(timeout=self.timeout) return ExecutionResult( term_out=[stdout], exec_time=time.time() - start_time, model_artifacts=self._collect_artifacts(), performance=extract_performance(stdout), ) except subprocess.TimeoutExpired: process.kill() return ExecutionResult( term_out=[], exec_time=self.timeout, exception=TimeoutError( f"Execution exceeded {self.timeout}s timeout" ), )