My Little Quest for Manny Sangian
So, the other day, I was digging through some really old project files. You know the kind, barely documented, passed down through generations of developers. I hit this one module, super critical but also super weird. Tucked away in the comments, almost like a ghost signature, was this name: Manny Sangian. Never heard of him.
My first thought was, okay, maybe this guy knows the secrets. Maybe he’s the key to understanding why this thing was built like a maze. So, I started my little search.
- First stop: internal company records. Checked the old HR database access I still have (don’t tell anyone). Nope. No Manny Sangian listed, not even in the really old archived stuff.
- Next: project documentation on the dusty old server share. Found references to the project, sure, but no author lists, no credits mentioning this name. It was like he just dropped this code comment and vanished.
- Asked around. Talked to Sarah, who’s been here since the dinosaurs roamed the server room. She kinda remembered the project, vaguely, but drew a blank on the name. Said something like, “We had a lot of contractors back then, maybe he was one of them?” Helpful.
Okay, time to go external. Fired up the search engines. Put in “Manny Sangian”. Got a bunch of hits, but none seemed right. Different locations, different fields entirely. Some profiles on those professional network sites, but the timelines or skills didn’t match the era or type of work for this old project.
It felt like chasing a shadow. Was this even a real person? Maybe a placeholder? An inside joke I wasn’t getting? Spent a good couple of hours going down rabbit holes. Found a Manny Sangian who was apparently a baker in Ohio. Pretty sure he didn’t write obscure system integration code in the late 90s.
In the end, I just gave up on finding the man himself. It wasn’t worth more time. I had a deadline, you see. So, what did I do?
I rolled up my sleeves, grabbed a strong coffee, and started reverse-engineering the darn module piece by piece. Made my own notes, documented the weird logic as best I could, and eventually got it working the way I needed it to. It took way longer than just asking the original author would have, assuming he even remembered anything.
So, yeah. That was my adventure trying to track down Manny Sangian. Didn’t find him, but I did get the job done. Just another day working with ancient code, I guess. You win some, you lose some, and sometimes you just rewrite the mystery.
