The Humano2 project - A Post mortem
Published: 2006-10-08
Category: Code
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Language: [English]
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I read a message today about google opening up a new service to search through all kinds of source-code available on the net.. mostly opensource projects that (obviously) have their code available online.

Anyway, i did some googling for "Humano2" to see what code was available. This made me think about things...

Humano2 was a project that I was part of a year or so ago. A few new guys (me included) had the task to move a patchwork of 5 years of undocumented cruft Visual basic 6 code to the new C#/.net/asp environment. The code is licenced under the GPL and was targeted to run on the opensource Mono and MS .net platforms.

Opensource is a big passion of mine. And getting paid for doing it.. well it was really a dream coming true.

I figure that, of the 70Megs of the original source code, maybe 5 to 10% was being used. The Problem was nobody knew which 5 to 10% :-D . The only real way forward was to go from scratch and do it all over again.

There were only two things we kept from the original code. First was the database model which, to this day, is one of the most elegant models I have ever seen. However since it is a meta-datamodel (data the model describes not only the data, but also its own structure) it takes about 3 weeks of banging your head to "get it".

Second thing we kept, was a "organicaly grown" query language called "ViewTools". Where the datamodel was elegant, ViewTools was a frankenstein. Just like the moster movie it had a distinct 60's look. In fact it was so weird, that the only part that was documented was ViewTools. Since even those coders knew, if they didn't document it, they would never understand it again. We also kept it. I wasn't in a position to change people's minds, since i didn't understand enough when the choice was made (i was new). It would have been so much easier if we had dumped ViewTools and just usted (a subset of) XQuery.

Of course we didn't meet either deadlines or quality standards. After over a year of working 14 hours, 6 days a week and generaly not having the feeling of getting anywere much. Someone called one day, to offer me a better paying, less hours job. I thought about it for a few sleepless nights. And in the end decided it wasn't worth the mental and fisical strain.

At that moment, I was incharge of development of the new version. Three weeks after I had left, the other two developers working on the new version had also found better things todo. Later they told me, that once I had gone, their "firewall" was gone and the company came at them "unfiltered".

Anyway I did the google and only found the code at a site that's really not related. The opensource humano2 project has, ended without any workable results. I guess that the company started all of this is still pushing the original code base to unwitting customers.

Since it's GPL, I have the source code as it ended up in the end, and I have decided to publish it again. Not that I have the hope that anybody will continue the proyect.. but some ideas or clases or functions might help a poor soul, somewhere at some moment. The code is here: http://protocultura.cl/svn/humano2-trunk/