Thanks for visiting Code Above Lab’s blog. I started Code Above Lab over three years ago, pretty much accidentally. I’ve been through 4 or so start-ups in the previous seven years and was a bit burned out. As I was preparing to take a hibernation stint, a close college friend of mine asked if I could help with one of his outsourced UI project that was bursting in flames…
Apparently, his predecessor thought it was a good idea to outsource to an offshore firm without the need for supervision other than a cursory look of the user interface. One look at the source code sends shivers up my spine. What the team had produced looked great from the UI, but the underlining code was so entangled and duplicated that I knew fixing one bugs was going to introduce new bugs. However, it was still somewhat salvageable if we can make some surgical separation of components, so I grudgingly signed up to help. To make a long story short, we ended up putting out the fire component-by-component, rewriting and abstracting along the way. It was the beginning of many on-fire projects that I ended up rescuing over the years.
That accidental consulting experience started the seed for Code Above Lab. I realized that there are a lot of projects that needed help. They get in trouble for some reasons, but all comes down to not following simple design principles and best practices (like following coding convention and write test cases). I was lucky to have worked with top-tier engineers early in my career (Thank you Netscape!) and continued to build upon that over the years. Now after weathering two tech booms, I, along with the team of firefighting engineers, have enough experience and tools on our utility belt help rescue companies that have projects on fire. Yes, we do feel like a superhero sometimes.