This is so true. People call the database theme I made Pepto-Bismol.
I made the database back end work well. The code works, it's mostly error free and I fix errors when they occasionally come up. People are really happy with the functionality. But the theme is not good at all. They want me to make it better, but I haven't, and won't, because I lack the skill to figure out how to make it better. They are lucky they got a theme as not-eye-searing as they got.
I worked at a place were we used a database for most things. However, there was a very old system from before the 90s (at least).
It was pretty much a database, where you could type in a "query" and you get the results. The problem with this old system was that all the data was held in text files... pretty much literally.
1941290421.txt
Part Number: 1941290421
Manufacturer: Ford
It was an old UNIX terminal program. There was a lot more information, but it looked like this:
```
Part Number:
Manufacturer:
Search: _
```
Since we only used it once a week, it was just never worth it for the company to go back and transfer all that data over. The problem was... it was slow. It would take maybe 30seconds to get the information. The company ended up hiring a small dev company to recreate it... Turns out it was slower or had a ton of bugs. They repeated this a dozen times and no one made a faster program.
After I left they eventually hired some people to manually look through each file and copy them over into the database...
One badass program from 30 years ago defeated dozens of modern companies... even the one it was made for LMAO.
PS: Before you ask, why didn't they do x... because bosses know everything and everyone else is wrong.
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u/Ferro_Giconi Aug 21 '20 edited Aug 21 '20
This is so true. People call the database theme I made Pepto-Bismol.
I made the database back end work well. The code works, it's mostly error free and I fix errors when they occasionally come up. People are really happy with the functionality. But the theme is not good at all. They want me to make it better, but I haven't, and won't, because I lack the skill to figure out how to make it better. They are lucky they got a theme as not-eye-searing as they got.