My friend Michael and myself have been hacking some features into a specific version of picketlink. An update to a newer version was out of the question. We blogged about it over here.
I really like to get my head around existing code bases. Finding my ways through them and fixing or modifing them. I should do that far more often!
Anyway, I don’t want to rant too much about picketlink. It works most of the time. But man… there are some code smells in there. If I’m modifying a class somewhere down around line 3500-something, this is a smell. If a class needs more than 1000 LoC, it should probably not be a single class. DRY anyone? Enough of a rant… Our modifications aren’t really that much better. Broken window theory at work…