Gather round disciples, your master is finally ready to reveal the ultimate secrets of the senior developers. Learn how to transform complex, unreadable code into poetry. Or, more accurately, learn what goes through an old developer's head when he's trying to clean up some dodgy code.
When I started out as a developer the internet was made of wood and owl feathers, held together with spit, pluck, gumption and whatever else it is that you kids today no longer seem to have (job security? the possibility of owning your own home? a habitable climate?). We had to chisel our code out of the rocks 26 hours a day, 10 days a week, wait two years for it to compile, and the only way of knowing if it worked was if the old wise woman of the company divined the error messages in the entrails of a junior developer. I am now that wise old woman, and so I must pass on the things I have learned.
