Yes, this article will use the 5 stages of grief as an analogy for something software development-related. There are at least a few thousand other articles with a similar motif (424,000 results for “grief stages software” according to Google). But bear with me for the next 5 minutes and I promise you’ll get something out of this — if nothing else, at least the smirk of those who read their past follies put on text by someone else.

I have been working on a rather big Rails project for the past year and half. The project is nearly 7 years old, and has an all-too-common successful-startup-bought-by-industry-giant background story. In a project with this kind of background, some things are bound to happen: many developers of many skill ranges have come and gone, many software fads (cough, Meteor, cough), and above all else a lot of legacy code that is, well, let’s put it nicely, not so great. None of this should be taken personally in any way — it is just natural for such things to occur in such projects.