Programming Feffadoos

Here’s what went right during development:

The program is VERY efficient at storing files as text, and I keep finding new uses for it that I never foresaw. The fact that it even works is impressive, and that it is even libre despite being glued-together all the way down. It also has a neat magic number, and it doesn’t do padding like AES256-CBC or have bloat like BZip2 has. It’s also portable and usable offline, and it even works in IE and old Edge. It is also REALLY good at making secure passwords. It’s also backwards and forwards-compatible. Also, it’s written in JavaScript of all languages. Also, the .B3K extension is an extension that was unclaimed before I used it.

What went wrong:

There was the situation where people think .B3K files begin with 0xEFBBBFF4B480 rather than 0xFEFF4D00 like they should, and then there’s the fact that there were bugs in it that I had to fix that didn’t originally exist, even on period-correct browsers. Also, it was an absolute pain to debug, and I had to switch certain implementations of certain parts of it at certain points, and do some special stuff to make compatibility a thing. It was a project I started MANY years ago. Also, it’s slow on large files. Also, nobody supports Unicode passwords.

What did I learn?

Compatibility is important. Cross-check your code and test for corner cases. Additionally, debugging can be a pain, and that scope creep and feature creep can happen, but are not always bad. Also accidents can be good, and even save the whole thing. Also, standards can exist for eons. And of course that files do not have to be binary. Also, teenage code can be good (I was barely 17 when I wrote the 2019 version).