Preface

It was 2008, and banks were closing left and right. I was working at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), whose primary task is to pay back depositors of closed, failed, and insolvent banks. I admit that, in terms of job security, my job was on par with working at Lehman Brothers or being a ticket salesman for the Titanic. But when my department’s eventual budget cuts were still far in the future, I had the chance to work on an app called Electronic Deposit Insurance Estimator (EDIE). The app became hugely popular for a simple reason: people were anxious to find out how much of their savings was insured by the United States federal government, and EDIE estimated that amount.

But there was a catch: people don’t like to tell the government about their private accounts. To protect their privacy, the app was made entirely in front-end JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, without any back-end technologies. This way, the FDIC wasn’t collecting any financial information.

The app was a hot mess of spaghetti code left by dozens of iterations of consultants. Developers came and went, leaving no documentation and nothing resembling any logical, simple algorithms. It was like trying to use the New York City subway without a map. There were myriads of functions to call other functions, strange data structures, and more functions. In modern terminology, the app was pure user interface (UI), because it had no backend.