Being a freelancer is hard. Being a freelancer during the downturn after the Dot-Com bust was even harder. Jorge was in that position, scrambling from small job to small job, fighting to make ends meet, when one of his freelance clients offered him a full-time gig.

Carol, the customer, said Jorge, were really short-handed and need help. Wed like you to start on Monday. You know PHP, right?

Jorge didnt know PHP, but he knew plenty of other languages. He said yes, crash-coursed over the weekend, and was confident he could learn the rest on the job. When he showed up on Monday, Carol introduced him to Luke- who will mentor you on our application.

Hey! Luke grabbed Jorges hand, started shaking, and kept at it for far longer than comfortable. Its great to have you here, really great, youre really going to like our code, its really really great. Weve got a lot of great customers, and theyre really really happy with our great software. Do you like encryption? I built our encryption layer. Its really really great. And I hope you like getting things done, because weve got a really really great environment with no obstacles.

Jorge recovered his hand, wiped it on his pants, and tried to smile to cover the internal panic that was taking over his thought processes. That internal panic got louder and louder as Luke showed him the ropes.

They had a few dozen tiny applications, and the code for those applications lived in one place: the production server. Server, singular. There was no dev environment, there was no source control server. Their issue tracking was, When theres an issue, a customer will call you, and youll fix it. Luke explained, I like to work on it while Im on the phone with them, so I can just edit the code and have them refresh the page right there.

Jorge nearly quit, but Carol had been a great customer in the past, and he really wanted a steady gig. He ignored his gut, and instead tried to convince himself, This is an opportunity. I can help them get really up to speed.

He found an ancient Cobalt RaQ in a closet, with a 366MHz processor (with MMX!) and 64MB of RAM. Jorge hammered on that whenever he had a spare moment, setting it up as a dev environment, a CVS server and Bugzilla. This took weeks, because Jorge didnt have a lot of spare moments. Luke kept him busy on a deep dive into the code.

Jorge was largely ignorant of PHPs details and nuances, but Luke was massively ignorant. Lukes indentation was so chaotic it could double as a cryptographically secure random number generator. Wherever possible, Luke reinvented wheels. Instead of using a server-side redirect, he instead injected a

http://thedailywtf.com/articles/freelanced