Inevitably when I revisit old code it's nothing but cringe as I see all the mistakes I made. The only plus side is it helps convince me I've actually improved over the years and it hasn't all been in vain

@nerd2ninja and I were talking about ruby recently and it reminded me of an iOS app I developed and never released (circa 2012) written in ruby using Ruby Motion.

I hadn't done much meta-programming up until this point.

      def included step
        steps << step

        # dark magic (:include is private) to keep our models DRY
        step.send(:include, Model)
        step.columns :progress => :integer,
                     :day_id => :integer
        step.extend(ClassMethods)
      end

The app was a positive psychology app called '21days'. It'd take you through 21 days of exercises (attempting to form habits) including mindfulness meditation, gratitude journaling, kindfulness exercises, reinforcing social connections, and future prompting. It was nearly finished when I stopped working on it. At some point I realized I didn't want to use it - it asked users to do a lot.

Not necessarily fondly since most of the times, my old code does not show the effort that I put into it anymore, lol. It's decent for the experience I had back then, but definitely nothing that I am proud of now, haha

But your comment below (or above, not sure where this comment will end up) reminded me of a project I did for a seminar about algorithmic sound: I had great ambitions to create something like a framework which can add sound to any algorithm.

Learning about SuperCollider was a lot of fun. It also felt very different to normal programming since most of the times, we don't add sound to our programs (for good reasons, haha, I guess we learned our lessons back when the web started to get popular).

Another project I did and was pretty proud of at the time was to create a CLI to query train connections. I used to not have a lot of mobile data per month and I realized that I could write a simple CLI which I could run on a server. In theory, connecting to that server via SSH and running that script should use a lot less bandwidth then using the official app. This should help me find back home when my mobile data was used up and my connection was throttled such that the app was basically impossible to use.

I think I used it a few times and my theory was right but I didn't use it that much as I thought I would.

Was still a nice idea imo and during an interview, a lead engineer seemed to be quite interested in it. I think this project helped in their decision to hire me but I declined the offer since I found a position I was more interested in.

I used to hardcode credentials in my old code, so I avoid looking at it. Ever. In fact, anyone who has ever reviewed it mysteriously disappeared.

Sometimes yes, other times no. Sometimes the code is just super clean and elegant, which makes me giddy. Other times it’s a hack that I never got a chance to circle back and address. Meh

I sometimes do this but the funnier thing is looking at code and thinking who wrote this. Then git blame oh. Sigh.