zlacker

I agree with all of your comment. This was indeed pretty unique case. No one in my small company (including me) actually knew that codebase, it was total mess written by original EE (who sayed himself he was not a programmer), it was pretty small (32kb of rom puts a limit on your codebase) by "team of programmers" standards and currently we have no one else who could actually do anything with that code, one coworker is learning to write firmware and new version is already much more readable and reasonable. It was TOTALLY in need of rewrite, but not all code is a good candidate for something like this.

> I'm actually more surprised your manager/PM let you do this. Most of the time this happens as a skunkworks thing.

I didn't know it will take so long, delving into this was like a frctal of bad code. When I've tried to fix something, it required fixes in other places which required fixes in another places. I could make several TDWTF posts from that code.

> Rewrites should always be incremental, never big bang, and never in isolation.

Yeah, but that codebase was not that big, so it was medium size bang. Never in isolation - there was no one other at my company who could actually do it and it was tested functionally by others once it was stable enough.