Interesting how in the end, the mistakes in the development were meaningless. If everything had gone 100% perfectly for him, the law would still have destroyed him, like a divine act. At least the programmer and the author obtained some experience out of the ordeal.
I don't fully understand why you had to start from scratch every time you were forced to change programmers. Was there no way to get the incomplete code and continue building on that?
Yes, and one of the times that's what we did. I wasn't good enough at keeping the codebase modularised, readable and documented so it wan't all that much of a help.