I got in contact with Republic Bricks earlier this year and he asked me to complete his app. He mentioned that it would be similar to Whatnot but more focused on Lego products and live games. At this stage, I thought it wouldn't be this hard because I was assured that the developer before me was "almost done". This turned out to be absolutely not the case. After I signed the contract I got handed a mess of a codebase. The deeper I dug the more I saw ternary operators that went over 20 lines and no code structure. I then started to research the previous developer just to realize that he hadn't developed anything and that this was his first project. So somehow this developer convinced himself that he could build a live streaming app with multiple real-time data streams as a first project AND take money for doing so. Awesome...
Three months later I am now at a stage where I am confident enough that I fixed most of the issues and got it to a semi-stable stage for v1.0.0. Along the way, I learned a good amount of stuff ranging from the ins and outs of Flutter (which I hadn't touched before) over to Payment and shipping.
But most of all. How to read and fix code from people you never met. This really turned out to be the biggest challenge and I want to share some of the beauty I found in this codebase
I cut out some of the code but I think you got the drift. This giant of a code is supposed to manage either showing your address or opening the form to add a new address. I wish that would be the only place where Teneray operators were abused like this. but no. this is just the shortest one. This kinda feels like a throwback to the good old JQuery times but even there this would have been a nightmare to debug.
This went on for multiple months of headaches and screaming at the monitor. In one of those moments, I decided to take another look at the website of the old developer where I found everything I needed to know. In his bio, he had the following statement:
I'm currently doing contract work as a full product software developer. I say full product instead of "full stack" because I'm much more interested in building things than how I build them.
Well, at least he is honest about his work...
This app was or rather is one hell of a ride but I am all here for it. Let's see where it goes from here.
If you are interested in trying out Bid Bro you can join our Test flight program or download it straight from the Google Play Store.
