Have you seen that SSL port?

Back in the day when i was still a zombie developer in some big crappy company :P, we were asked to implement SSL support in our main project, as always, our clueless leader made a really big deal out of it, went to wikipedia and read a few blog posts about SSL and the problems that we could face, then screwed what should have been a very simple operation.

Armed with all the gained knowledge he got from the web, he asked if there were some of us who knew what SSL was, after some of us came forward and say yes, he gave us the usual talk, recommended us to look at some very good sites on the web were we could learn all about SSL and finally, gave us the url for ‘a very good site were you can find a lot of things SSL related: http://www.openssl.org’

Finally, he doubted we could handle the project so he recommended to hire another developer just for this task, a ‘SSL expert’ was hired, it took one week for him to research what was supposed we should do, at the end of the week, he came to me and said, have you done some code already? i took a deep look at him and asked, why? have you? and he went white and said, well yeah i downloaded a few samples from the web, but i can’t compile, i get linker errors and can’t fix them, he spend all the week playing with some very old code he downloaded from the web!

At the end, i had to add SSL support in two days, since the guy burned all the time we had, two week delivery remember, lets use ‘Agile development’ and surprise the client and make miracles! that’s the spirit yeah! management, as always, was clueless, they asked him what was the result of the week he spent ‘researching’ and he simply said ‘i wrote the SSL support and one of your developers is integrating everything’, and of course nobody asked me what really went on, project leaders don’t make mistakes do they?

But anyway, after that, another issue came forward, the big boss didn’t understood a word about SSL or sockets (or anything at all) so he asked, do we have SSL support for this release cycle? and the answer was yes, then he asked for details, and we, as inocent developers we were, gave them away, and that’s were all hell broke lo0se :P, he simply could not understand how the same port number we were using before for simple sockets was now the ‘SSL port’, since we didn’t preserved support for simple sockets and instead used the same port for SSL, after the meeting ended, we got a call from our project leader, completely freaked out asking what the hell was going on and what had we done with the ‘SSL port’ and the ‘old port’, they couldn’t understand that SSL was just encrypting the data over the same port, there had to be a “SSL port” as if it was a physical port, the joke went on for months after that, we even had an idea of printing some milk carton with an ad for the missing ‘port’..