You wrote it all? By yourself? That sounds ideal to me. The horrible part of this to me is that he inherited a mess and left without having done much to it, evidently being unable to do so for whatever reason. The headline says he "mastered" it, so clearly other forces were at work than his skill. That's the depressing part to me, pulling my hair out to try and understand someone else's antediluvian code base which was built under duress.

I think devs imagine someone else out there is having a better time at their computer than they are. I definitely do.