For the last two weeks I’ve been working on adding features to a flash portion of a large retail website. The code is written as if someone started out with 10 different ideas of how to properly program (50% of the code lines miss the semi-colon). Dozens of design patterns thrown together. 30% of the classes doesn’t seem to be used. One of the main .fla’s contain tons of files for different campaign sites done by the same production company.
Then it’s as if the code has gone through the washing machine a few times, totally whacked. And yet it magically works.

I have in short time gone from making small banners to dealing with this, so I’m learning a lot and your posts have somehow synced with my current experiences, that’s what’s so scary!

Today, for the first time, I wrote a specific helper class just for this project alone, although it’ll be useful later on.

Class is called ChildSupport, and you simply feed it a DisplayObjectContainer and it parses through it and recursively lists all children, optionally the x & y values of the children and also you can choose how many levels deep you want to go.
(At first I ran it on the whole project container and it of course timed out with hundreds of movieclips filling flashlog.txt).

Nothing groundbreaking, but for me it’s huge, and quite fun indeed! While at the same time I was worried I was straying too far from the main objective. Again, you’re nailing it spot on in your post!

Are you sure you don’t want to come to Stockholm and work with us? In code nerd land, I’d probably want to marry you.

Keep the blog alive, it’s awesome!