A discreet inquiry revealed they believed they had a unique custom solution, which, as it turned out, their competition now also possessed.”

Long ago, I was brought in as a consultant to review the code of a custom solution that wasn’t performing as expected. At that time, I was deeply involved in analyzing performance, caching strategies, code optimization, and similar areas. I had begun to build a small reputation for enhancing existing solutions, making them faster and more user-friendly.

The system I was examining was developed under the ‘full commitment’ of a prominent local consultancy firm. After the usual back-and-forth to gain access to servers, logs, and source code, I dove into the analysis. By the way, It was never easy to access these systems, regardless of who managed or developed them. As an external consultant, essentially poking around, I often had to navigate various challenges to obtain the necessary information.

The application logs, database, and other standard components appeared fine, but something felt wrong.

When I opened the code project and started my methodical review, I immediately saw something strange with the namespace: it contained a different company’s name, neither my client’s nor the developer’s.

So, what is a namespace? According to Microsoft, ‘The namespace keyword is used to declare a scope containing a set of related objects. You can use a namespace to organize code elements and create globally unique types.’

Finding another company’s name in the namespace was significant.
It suggested that this solution wasn’t originally developed for my client but for someone else, and then it was resold to my client as a custom solution — a questionable business practice, in my opinion.

The “fun” part was that I knew many people in the company mentioned in the namespace. A discreet inquiry revealed they believed they had a unique custom solution, which, as it turned out, their competition now also possessed.

I suggested some fixes, compiled my report, briefed the CIO, and moved on to another assignment. The aftermath of my report remains unknown.

Picture: I asked ChatGPT to generate a picture with this prompt: “can you generate a picture of code with namespace in c#” The picture doesnt makes sense at all. 🙂