Alright, let’s talk about this whole ‘hucci’ thing. It wasn’t even called ‘hucci’ officially, that was just the nickname we ended up giving it. When I first got put on the project using it, nobody could really explain what it was supposed to do, just that we had to use it.
My First Dance with ‘Hucci’
So, day one, I pull down the codebase. Standard stuff, right? Then I hit the ‘hucci’ layer. It felt… weird. Like someone tried to build a skyscraper with LEGOs and duct tape. Simple tasks took forever. You wanted to change a button color? You didn’t just change a CSS value. Oh no.
Here’s the crazy process I had to follow:
- First, I had to define the color change request in a specific XML file buried five folders deep.
- Then, I had to run a custom-built Java tool (that crashed half the time) to ‘compile’ this XML into some intermediate binary format.
- Next, I had to check that binary file into source control. Yes, binary blobs in Git. Fun.
- After that, another script needed to run during the build process to pick up this binary file and inject the ‘change’ into the actual application resources.
- Only then could I actually build and run the app to see if the freaking button color changed.
This wasn’t just for colors, mind you. Text changes, layout adjustments, simple logic toggles – everything seemed forced through this bizarre, clunky pipeline. My productivity just tanked. A five-minute change elsewhere became a two-hour ordeal with ‘hucci’.
Digging for the ‘Why’
I started asking around. Gently at first. “Hey, uh, this ‘hucci’ system seems a bit… involved. Is there a reason we do it this way?” Most folks just shrugged. “Always been like that,” they’d say. Or, “Yeah, it’s a pain, just gotta deal with it.”
But I kept digging. I cornered one of the older guys, Dave, during a coffee break. He’d been there forever. He sort of chuckled grimly.
Turns out, ‘hucci’ was born years ago. A manager, long gone now, had this grand vision. He thought developers couldn’t be trusted with direct access to UI elements or configurations. He read some article, probably misunderstood it, and decided they needed an ‘abstraction layer’ to ‘protect the system’. He hired a small, isolated team (who also left long ago) to build this thing. They built ‘hucci’.
The ‘logic’ was something like this:
- Force every change through a rigid, tool-enforced process.
- Make it hard to change things quickly, assuming that equals safety.
- Use obscure tooling so only ‘certified’ people (initially, just that one team) could make changes.
Of course, the manager left, the original team vanished, and the company was stuck with this monster. Nobody wanted to touch it, nobody had the budget or time to rip it out, and everyone was too scared to admit it was a complete disaster. So, project after project just kept layering more stuff on top of it, making it worse.
The Real Cost
This wasn’t just annoying. It actively hurt us. We missed deadlines because simple changes took days. We introduced bugs because the complexity hid obvious problems. Morale was low because fighting ‘hucci’ drained all your energy.
I remember one time, we had a critical production bug. A simple typo on a payment screen. Should have been a 10-minute fix. With ‘hucci’, it took us nearly 8 hours. Eight hours of frantic XML editing, tool crashing, binary checking-in, and desperate build attempts, while the company was losing money. That was the day I really started looking for a new job.
So, ‘why hucci’? Not because it was smart, or efficient, or necessary. It was because of a bad idea from a long-gone manager, built by a vanished team, and maintained through sheer inertia and fear. It was a technical debt nightmare disguised as a process. And honestly, dealing with it was one of the main reasons I eventually had to get out of there.
