I didn't work on Ecommerce Playground yesterday for I had a bugfix gig offered to me. It was a small CSS fixes and a few JavaScript along the line. Now, that's not a fun story. Then let me tell you that I have to deal with compiled codebase. So long story short, my client is also a web developer and he has a client. His client wanted to redesign their old website, but for reasons that I'm not aware of (and I'm not willing to dug into), the former developer of their old website isn't available for this redesign job. The website owner apparently asked for the React codebase, and it is said by the current developer (my client) that the former developer isn't willing to let go of their React codebase for free. They asked quite some money for the codebase. The website owner refuse to heed the request or deal with legality issues and decided to go with another developer, who is my client.

The former developer was only willing with giving the compiled file from a React application. These files does not contain any JSX or some other preprocessed stuff like CRA, Webpack, or Babel. Just pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This... is quite a mess to deal with. I feel sorry for my client to get this cluster poo of codebase and I can see his effort to deal with it. I was asked for a few CSS fixes and JavaScript, and I have admitted to him that I'm a bit hesitant to deal with compiled stuff since, well, they're static files resulted from compiling source codes. He said that it's fine to apply "bandages" to these static files since it's all he has been doing with this codebase.

I don't know what's right or wrong in this kind of dispute. I had a client who wanted a full project once, and I'll give them the right for the App's codebase if they were to ask me. Why? Because they bought my service, therefore they basically bought the result of my service. Unless they asked me to maintain or become their half-employed developer, the code's ownership belongs to them.

Well, dealing with compiled code is probably one of the bad thing you can receive as a developer other than dealing with legacy codes. I won't pray to not ever receive them in my career later on, but I will pray that I have the wit to handle it appropriately. Thank you for reading my post and have a nice day.

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