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To breathe out, or ... *gulp* ... breathe in?  
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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While I agree with your last sentence, I have to say that I don't agree with your subject line.
You only survive for that many days on mechanical ventilation. (Fewer the older you are)
And seriously, If the choice is between suffocating or having a hose up my butt, I wouldn't need to think for long. 
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Yeah ... but think about the tv news pictures ...
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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No thanks, mental pictures are quite enough.
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You just took the mystery out of synchronized swimming.
It was only in wine that he laid down no limit for himself, but he did not allow himself to be confused by it.
― Confucian Analects: Rules of Confucius about his food
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Whiskey Tango Echo? 
What do they think config files, the Registry, etc. are there for?
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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So that's 66198 characters, the average word length in English is 4.7 characters, let's make a rough assumption that a variable name consists of an average of four words (probably stuff like useFeatureX), so that's around 20 characters per variable name and let's just say the same for a variable value, so 40 characters per setting, assuming it's something like someVar=someValue.
That makes 66198 / 40 = ~1655 settings?
That's assumption on assumption on assumption, but it's safe to say you* have A LOT! 
* Well, all the people from before you came along 
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Does the app really need both the old and new testaments?
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Marc Clifton wrote: So "we" (disclaimer, before I came along) have been stuffing all sorts of config stuff into the env vars on the server.
I believe what we have here is a perfect example of an anti-pattern.
Long ago someone did this and said, “well, it works”
People kept coming along and shrugging and saying “hmmm...well, it works”
Finally some unlucky sap finds out, “no, it doesn’t quite work.”
We all have these anti patterns we know and follow. We just mostly get lucky that it’s some other sap that learns they don’t quite work.
That’s a great story that many people think is the exception to IT but is really the rule.
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"Well it works"! Just like Schlmiel:
Quote: Shlemiel gets a job as a street painter, painting the dotted lines down the middle of the road. On the first day he takes a can of paint out to the road and finishes 300 yards of the road. “That’s pretty good!” says his boss, “you’re a fast worker!” and pays him a kopeck.
The next day Shlemiel only gets 150 yards done. “Well, that’s not nearly as good as yesterday, but you’re still a fast worker. 150 yards is respectable,” and pays him a kopeck.
The next day Shlemiel paints 30 yards of the road. “Only 30!” shouts his boss. “That’s unacceptable! On the first day you did ten times that much work! What’s going on?”
“I can’t help it,” says Shlemiel. “Every day I get farther and farther away from the paint can!”
Back to Basics – Joel on Software[^]
The more things change, the more they stay the same .
Mircea
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That article was an excellent read 
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Back in September 2003, I was very new to ASP.Net, having been using VB6 or VBScript/ASP before that. I'd done a couple of very basic "Hello world, how are you today?" (i.e. a bit more than Hello World) websites but had a genuine (personal) need to write something meatier. I needed a tool that would read an email inbox, extract messages, parse out, resize and save image attachments, extract the email HTML content, insert formatted details about the sender and the subject, put it all in a WYSIWYG editor and allow me to send the combined thing to a database-hosted mailing list. So quite a few discrete areas, plus some client-side trickiness. I managed it in about 3 weeks, not having used C# before. I've been using the tool since then, initially daily but for the past 5 years just weekly, with virtually zero changes and no significant bugs.
However it irked me that the quality of the code was simply appalling. So last night I sat down and rewrote it from scratch, in three hours. It works better, faster, without barfing over jpg vs. jpeg file extensions, or complaining about BASE64 encoding quirks, and without messing up tabs, em-dashes and other characters in the email texts. I've used some 3rd party components, but back in 2003 I wouldn't have known where to even start looking for them, let alone how to integrate them into my own code.
OK, one would hope I'd sped up a bit from a rookie coder, but it really underlines to me the value that experience brings (plus, it must be said, the evolution from VisualStudio2000 to VS2019).
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Yep. I started c# in 2004, with a password storage app I still use and keep threatening to replace with a much better one - but it works, and I haven't had to touch it for well over a decade.
I know the code is cr@p though - and it irks me every time I use it ...
One day, one day ...
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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There's this story on the internet, my Google-fu is failing me right now, but I remember it, mostly.
Some guy has an issue with his computer and nothing works, so he takes his computer to an expert to have a look at it.
The expert clicks a single button and the issue is resolved.
"That's €100", the expert says.
"What!?" says the man, outraged, "All you did was click a single button!"
"Yeah", says the expert "clicking the button costs you €0,05, knowing where to click is the other €99,95." 
Not sure where I was going with this, but congrats
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I think the original of the story involved a fridge and a kick. Same punchline.
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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Here's the original story...
Charles Proteus Steinmetz, the Wizard of Schenectady |History | Smithsonian Magazine[^]
Quote: Ford, whose electrical engineers couldn’t solve some problems they were having with a gigantic generator, called Steinmetz in to the plant. Upon arriving, Steinmetz rejected all assistance and asked only for a notebook, pencil and cot. According to Scott, Steinmetz listened to the generator and scribbled computations on the notepad for two straight days and nights. On the second night, he asked for a ladder, climbed up the generator and made a chalk mark on its side. Then he told Ford’s skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did, and the generator performed to perfection.
Henry Ford was thrilled until he got an invoice from General Electric in the amount of $10,000. Ford acknowledged Steinmetz’s success but balked at the figure. He asked for an itemized bill.
Steinmetz, Scott wrote, responded personally to Ford’s request with the following:
Making chalk mark on generator $1.
Knowing where to make mark $9,999.
Ford paid the bill.
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Nope, I'm pretty sure my story involved some IT guy clicking a button, but it's a variation on a theme
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I have a DAL that I inherited from another dev written in VB5 using Access, converted to VB6 and SQL Server, then to c# then added Postgre, then added Oracle, then threw out Postgre and added MySQL, then chucked the entire thing out and started again because the code was such a kludge it was barely useable. When I retired I was still not happy with it.
If anyone runs across DBops please do NOT contact me.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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i looked in the mirror, and, it shattered;
shards of flying glass cut my wrists; the
blood became a message on the tiled floor:
unrecoverable error: face can not be null
by the time i found my face, and paid the
ransomware, i'd lost almost all my beauty:
vigilantes were out, hunting for shoppers
trying to purchase mirrors after midnight
there was half a happy meal in the fridge:
i microwaved it so long my cat didn't try
to steal it; my telephone kept on ringing;
i said no to offers of supernatural power
these trifling speed-bumps on the road to
eternity aside, it was a near perfect day remember: [^]
copyright assigned to CodeProject under the terms of the CPOPL license (CodeProject Open Poetic License)
«One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.» Salvador Dali
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Is that the lyrics? They are insane! 
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For days I have been looking for my passport and car papers, turned the whole house upside down, emptied the garbage bins, called colleagues at work if they found something etc.
Today we did search everything again and surprise, the papers were still in my laptop bag.
I had put them in a different compartiment than usual ...
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I have the same problem: I can find anything I put down, provided it hasn't been moved ... and provided I haven't "Put it somewhere safe so I won't lose it" ... 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I chalk all of this and more up to getting older and the gradual decline of mental cognition and memory. If you add stress to this as well, it makes it much worse.
I write notes to remind myself to do things, only to forget where I put my notes, or to forget that I wrote a note to remind myself to do something. 
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