OMVIF - Oh my version is FASTER !!

Let's imagine you have a legacy system. Lets call it Dragon. Legacy in the sense, no one knows whats going on in Dragon. Let's say the code base is *horrible* and millions of LOCs. So no one understands it.

But..Dragon juussst works fine...!

However, no one is brave enough to fight dragon (extend it? or just to be with it), because the moment you make a change, earth just stops spinning then starts spinning the opposite direction until you roll back your changes. And you have no clue how your change in dragon messed with earth's spin.

Some times you hate dragon, some times you respect it, love it ! wish you could understand it more.

But this is certainly not a good position to be. You know it better than me. So in such situations, there are many interesting things happening around you. One such thing is “OMVIF” or “Oh my version is FASTER”. This happens, when you decided *not* to touch the Dragon but do a part of Dragon in your own language/technology. You take a part, a very simple part, understand it, and re-implement it in your favourite technology. “Oh” you say. My version is FASTER than Dragon.

Now at this point. Long story short. Ask this question from you.

“What did I do *SPECIAL* (optimisations) to make it faster ?”

IF the answer is *NO*,  and you just did it the most obvious way, straight forward implementation, no optimisations !

Unfortunately if thats the case, 90% of the time, you are simply missing something in your implementation, which means your implementation is *FAST* because it is *NOT* what dragon does.

Or in other words, your implementation is *FAST* because it is incomplete.

So Dragon Winks.


Just think, If you didn’t do any *SPECIAL* optimisations, and even after that your version is faster, is that mean, Dragon is just plain dumb ? Can be.. But sadly it is very very very rare !

So next time when you feel “OMVIF” ! Just.. look at the dragon.