So, I saw this term, “candy cummings,” floating around online the other day. Don’t ask me where, the internet’s a weird place, right? It just got me thinking about some of the crazy stuff you run into, especially digging through old project files or dealing with weird legacy systems.
Reminds me of this one gig I had a few years back. Not gonna name names, but it was one of those places where things were… well, chaotic. Total mess, honestly. We inherited this old database, like ancient. Nobody knew who built it originally, or why they made certain choices. Documentation? Forget about it.
Digging Through the Digital Junkyard
My job involved trying to make sense of some of the data tables for a new feature we were supposed to bolt on. And the naming conventions… oh boy. It was like someone just typed whatever popped into their head at that moment. Stuff like:
- ‘MiscStuff_TEMP_FINAL_USETHIS’
- ‘UserData_MaybeImportant’
- And a bunch of just random strings, acronyms nobody remembered.
You’d find comments in the code that were just inside jokes from like, ten years ago. Completely useless. One time, I found a variable named ‘magic_unicorn_powder’. Seriously. I spent half a day trying to figure out what it actually did. Turned out it was just a flag for some obscure setting that wasn’t even used anymore.
You’d ask the senior guys, the ones who’d been there forever. They’d just shrug. “Yeah, that’s Dave’s old code. He left years ago. Good luck.” Super helpful, right?
Why It Matters (Sort Of)
It wasn’t just funny names, though. This kind of digital hoarding and lack of clarity made actual work really hard. Trying to build anything new on top of that mess was like building a house on quicksand. Everything took twice as long. You’d fix one thing, and two other unrelated things would break because of some hidden dependency on ‘magic_unicorn_powder’ or whatever.
It’s like, you see these weird terms or project names, sometimes goofy, sometimes just nonsensical like maybe ‘candy cummings’ might sound to someone out of context, and it’s a sign. A sign that maybe things weren’t planned out too well. People just did whatever, slapped a label on it, and moved on. Left the mess for the next person.
Ended up leaving that place, by the way. Couldn’t handle the constant archaeology project just to do simple tasks. Found a spot where things are, let’s just say, a bit more organized. Still run into weird stuff sometimes, that’s just the nature of the beast. But nothing quite like digging through Dave’s decade-old digital attic full of who-knows-what.
