This article about the types of legacy code bases you will have to deal with just made my day!

Not only do I have every one it describes but somehow it even made me laugh at thought of each of the std riddled petri dishes of code that I reluctantly maintain... My "Happy Place" is a folder dedicated to reliquary projects I like to look at when I feel sad to lift my spirits and restore hope that one day things will be better.

Do you have any definitions to add or know where to find more? I'm hooked.

Link: https://medium.com/@dylanbeattie/...

Excerpt:

The Reliquary

The reliquary is that one repository full of really good ideas. Clean code. Brilliant algorithms. The OpenID implementation that you optimised until it shone. Classes so beautifully designed and perfectly documented that they’d make a senior architect weep.

You remember the big rewrite? The project that was going to fix everything, only you never worked out how to actually launch the thing, or get any revenue from it? The reliquary is where you’ve preserved it, pickled in revision control like a fabulous museum specimen. A treasury of good code and good ideas; maybe even an entire codebase that was “a couple of weeks” away from shipping before somebody finally looked at the number of critical features the team had somehow forgotten to include and discovered — to everybody’s surprise — that validated XHTML, normalised data models and 95% test coverage are not actually features any of your end users cared about.

Like Buran or the Spruce Goose, the surviving artefacts stand as a testament to the quality of your engineering… and a poignant reminder of just how much fun engineers can have building high-quality stuff that nobody actually wants to use.