First of all, love the Lord God with your whole heart, your whole soul, and your whole strength.

It was PERL, Mysql, PHP.

I didn't owe the guy anything. I offered to come in and help him. He sprung the deadline on me after convincing me to add a feature before doing any of the things I recommended. When new problems on their end arose [by day 5 it was clear they had no idea how the feature would actually be handled by the backend, yet had gotten my commitment only to do front end->middleware work.

Even then, I offered to give up my weekend to resolve it.

From my perspective, the micromanagement and time wasted due to logistical issues and failure to follow through on promises of consulting with their administrator [who turned out to be unavailable for the duration] - and their failure to produce any documentation.

They burned my weekend with their situation. I told them what needed to be done to do the job right and they insisted on doing it their way.

I was totally comfortable with all the code we saw. It had been maybe a decade since one language and a simple mistake due to that cost us one afternoon.

But yeah that last call.. I had been working solo all weekend on cleaning up the middleware, and looking at an old module the Jr. dev hadn't even seen before. Yet the boss, at the eleventh hour, once again does that 'how can we just make a quick fix' and proceeds to get a suggestion from the Jr. Dev who hasn't even seen this module we need to interface with.

Thanks again. Yeah I am just getting back into the game and it was a good lesson. Your words will be seriously considered.

Thanks. Makes me feel better. I feel like a bit of a failure, and I did create a few bugs along the way. I'm a bit of a sloppy programmer because I have always pampered myself with realtime access to server logs and the ability to edit directly in a live running environment.

I still think though I was set up to fail, and overconfidence or too much time spent doing things like make the codebase readable was less of a deficit than the other problems artificially imposed.