Now I go cleaning windows to earn an honest bob

[austin_dern]

The week before Halloween I started on a new big task at work. This was going through the code of one of the two projects I'm on and, basically, cleaning it out. The projects I'm on are ones with broad scope, meant to handle a lot of individual tasks. And it was developed by someone now spoken of only warily as the Previous Developer, someone who was definitely in way over his head, stitching together StackOverflow answers at seeming random and copy-pasting lots of stuff everywhere.

I picked this task as something I could make progress on during a short week, and set down and pick up again without being completely lost for where I was. The three-day week was for a personal holiday: bunnyhugger and I were going to Cedar Point for Halloweekends. And as Halloweekends has expanded now Thursday through Sunday --- it's maybe four years away from becoming just Halloweeks --- we were expanding our trip to match. To get the full experience I was taking Thursday and Friday off. bunnyhugger had no classes those days, as usual, although that doesn't mean she didn't have more schoolwork than she wanted that needed to be done while driving down. We had picked the last weekend of the park season because we like going there closing day, and it was a little cheaper when we booked, and we thought the weather might be a little cooler and less pleasant so we'd have our best circumstance, a park fully open but with only a small die-hard group of attendees. No luck there; it was, once more, a warm and sunny weekend, even on the cool days just getting down to light jacket weather.

More on that to come. The big clean-up project, meanwhile, turns out I'm still doing as of today, when I put in a pull request [*] for my fourth great big change in how things are built. You might imagine it's frustrating finding myself doing the same kind of thing for nearly two months straight. You'd be wrong; I'm finding this very gratifying work. There is something wonderful in finding stuff that isn't needed, or finding that a tiny change can mean you can throw out huge blocks of code. We've long since passed the point that I have added a net negative number of lines of code, and it's continuing. I think I'm at the end of making any big code reductions, but then I thought that a month ago too and discovered surprises.

[*] A ``pull request'' is a thing in content management that really seems like it should be called a ``push'', but they already have something called a ``push'' and it's what seems like what ought to be called a ``pull'', although that's sometimes called a ``fetch'' instead. I may have this wrong, but there's no way to tell.

Also everyone else on the project is really happy with all this code-yeeting. The other programmers, who tried to guide the Previous Developer into better structures, are seeing enough clutter removed to rebuild the project well. Also it loads enormously faster, not weighted down with useless tools like Angular or multiple yet incompatible systems to make confirmation dialogues look prettier. Or trying to load two different versions of jQuery every page. This has also included separating what had been inline Javascript and stylesheets into separate files for each page, a feat mercifully done by a tool a different developer whipped up. But I could go through after that and found all sorts of commonalities that could be put into shared files, taking out a lot of copy-pasted stuff that would make the site difficult to impossible to keep consistent, so far as it's consistent at all. Or discovering little feats of madness.

One of my small triumphs was changing into something that makes sense a bit of style sheet that (renaming things a little to make this harder for supervisors to run across) went basically like:

div.div-show{
   display: none;
}

I realize including stylesheet stuff is a little inside-baseball but if you just read this stuff for the normal everyday meaning of words you'll see why this is bizarre. So it's been very gratifying taking a lot of that stuff out, lately.

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And now, what you maybe never thought would happen, the last photographs from the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk! Until we get to Thursday's pictures!

Here we are, back on the street, outside the arcade (on the right). Notice they've got a shark up above the door there.

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And there's the doors to the arcade, dubbed the neptune Kingdom, and offering --- truly --- games miniature golf pool restaurant.

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Looking up the street, and along the trolley tracks. I wonder where the casino is.

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And back down the other way, including to the spot where we got our tickets and entered the boardwalk. You might also just barely be able to make out Giant Dipper in the distant center.

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There's the spot where we entered! Not the only entrance to the boardwalk, but one that's got a nice bright sign for it.

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And that's the sign. That's where we spent the day; what do you think of it?

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Trivia: Between 1926 and 1935 IBM's sales of punch cards, its main revenue and profit center, grew from $2.6 million to about $4 million per year. Source: Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry They Created 1865 - 1956, James W Cortada.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 30: Popeye and the Evil Echo, Bela Sims, Tom Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.