My Brush with Singletary's "Wisdom"
Okay, so there was this one time, years ago, I was working on this really fiddly project. You know the type, where everything feels like it's held together with spit and prayer. My then-lead, this old-timer who'd seen it all, he just grunts one day, "Ever look into John Singletary's stuff for this kind of mess?"
John Singletary? Who the heck was that? Sounded like a character from an old western movie. But no, apparently, he was some kind of obscure programmer from way back, had some theories on, I don't know, system design or something equally vague. So, I thought, alright, boss man said so, let's dig in. Curiosity, you know? Plus, I was desperate.
The Great Singletary Hunt
And let me tell you, finding anything concrete on this John Singletary was a job in itself. It wasn't like today, where you just Google it and bam, thousands of articles pop up. No, sir. This was more like searching through ancient, dusty library stacks. I found a couple of mentions in some super old forum archives, a footnote in a PDF that looked like it was scanned from a document typed on a typewriter. It was all very...cryptic. Lots of talk about "holistic data flows" and "synergistic node architecture." Sounded super smart, meant absolutely nothing to me at the time.
- Tried to find his actual code examples. Good luck with that, it was like they never existed.
- Found some online discussions from like, the late 90s, where people argued if he was a genius or just making things up.
- The few diagrams I managed to unearth looked like a bowl of spaghetti thrown at a wall. Seriously.
Putting "Singletary" to Work (or Trying To)
So, I pieced together what I thought was his main idea. It was something about… well, frankly, I'm still not entirely sure even now. It seemed to involve a lot of manual tracking of things and some very unconventional ways of linking different parts of a system. I decided to try and apply a bit of it to a small, troublesome part of our project. I spent, no joke, like a whole week trying to make sense of his scribblings and implement this "Singletary-esque" fix.
My teammates looked at me like I had suddenly grown a second head. "What on earth are you even doing over there?" one of them finally asked. I just mumbled something about "exploring alternative design methodologies." Yeah, right. More like "exploring the depths of my own mounting confusion."
The Grand Finale? Not So Grand, Actually.
And the result of all this effort? Drumroll, please… It kinda, sorta, maybe made a tiny, almost imperceptible improvement? Or maybe it just broke something else in a new and exciting way that we hadn't discovered yet. It was really hard to tell. The whole system was such a tangled mess anyway. What I do know for sure is that it made that particular piece of code incredibly hard to understand for anyone else. Including future me, looking back at it.
Eventually, we just ripped out my "Singletary experiment" during a big refactor a few months later. The lead, the one who suggested I look into him in the first place? He'd already moved on to another company by then. Figures, right?
So, yeah. John Singletary. For me, that name is a reminder that not all old wisdom is gold. Sometimes it’s just… old and outdated. And sometimes, you spend a solid week chasing a ghost down a rabbit hole for absolutely no good reason except someone vaguely told you to. You live and you learn, I guess. Or you don't, and just keep digging up weird old tech stuff from the past. Whatever floats your boat, man.
