The Pragmatic Programmer: your journey to mastery, 20th Anniversary Edition, 2nd Edition

Topic 47

Working Together

I've never met a human being who would want to read 17,000 pages of documentation, and if there was, I'd kill him to get him out of the gene pool.

Joseph Costello, President of Cadence

It was one of those “impossible” projects, the kind you hear about that sounds both exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. An ancient system was approaching end-of-life, the hardware was physically going away, and a brand-new system had to be crafted that would match the (often undocumented) behavior exactly. Many hundreds of millions of dollars of other people's money would pass through this system, and the deadline from inception to deployment was on the order of months.

And that is where Andy and Dave first met. An impossible ...