cdybedahl | First week

Well, that was my first week as a Perl developer. I am much less worn out from a week of full time here than I used to be after a week of half-time at Telenor. Which is nice. Very nice, even.

I am now much more familiar with the way Internetbokhandeln works, and know why it's so relatively slow. A couple of changes of mine have gone live. Including one that makes a certain page load 7000 times faster than before. Which is kind of a degenerate case. The fix speeds up a lot of pages, although most of them probably by no more than an order of magnitude or two. I'm convinced that

gnapp and I can speed the entire thing up a lot, either by re-doing the foundations of the current system (which was, I'm told, copied from a German newspaper's site back in 1997) less badly, or moving the entire thing to Mason. The latter would probably be better in the long run, and possibly even less work to do.

It's kind of interesting reading the site's code, by the way. One can clearly see three different layers of development. At the top there's

gnapp's code, where the only problems are obviously the result of "We need this yesterday!"-type management. Under that is the code of her predecessors at Internetbokhandeln. That code is occasionally dodgy, but not too bad. Needs a major cleanup, but not quite a rewrite, if you see what I mean. Underneath that is the original German code. That is serious WTF? territory. Here we find things like redefining lc() in a way that only handles plain 7-bit ASCII (in German code!), and then calling CORE::lc() in subsequent code to get around the problem. Just to pick one thing that I can't even imagine a rational reason for.

Next week we get to see if Dell manages to deliver a computer for me to work on.