A funny guy. Runs a website selling his own software - well, his own in the sense he pays coders like me to write it, while he supplies the data in form of long texts which then need to be threaded into the tables.
One of the few guys who knew something about Yugoslavia and what went on there. Could be very funny, but in a sales pitch way, just give him an audience and he'll keep them amused to the point when they want to give him some money.
I inherited the app because the previous guy was seriously ill, and killed himself rather than to endure a leg amputation, or after the amputation. What he did with the code in the last months was probably a good reflection of how he felt. I inherited the mess, and no specs, no documentation. Strange how it all worked fine for most of the time, but streamlining the database never went all the way - there were always some orphans, duplicates, mismatches, in one word, cases of snafu. There were dead pieces of code - not just lines which will never run, but whole pages. A hundred line method would exit at line two, and why was the rest of it let in, who'd know that, analysis paralysis. Elsewhere there were serious bugs, understandably.
I took the job for several reasons - I really needed the money, never did something like this, and couldn't think of a sweater gig than taking money out of (future) lawyers' pockets. Namely the app was a collection of texts, mostly case studies and laws, which is what they use instead of textbooks at law schools. So it had oodles of text, organized sort of hierarchically. What I added was the ability to compose texts within the app, liberally copying pieces from this library. The cherry on top was the quick word search, so anything could be sought and found in less time than it would take to type the search term.
And then there was the protection/encryption part, where most of it worked great, but the unclear parts, which I didn't quite understand until it was too late and an open version was out, did me in. I failed to see something in the mess, somewhere in the code which I thought was dead, but an active version of it existed somewhere (!) so he was selling an unlocked version for a few days, because the code which was checking the exits from the apps (and erasing the clipboard then) somehow reported that this is admin version and allowed clipboard export. He raised quite a noise over this, and I wasn't quite sure that he even told me that this was not a test version, that it'd get distributed. Knowing who his customers were, he could count on it that if ever one of them realizes that he's got a version that the others don't have, there'll be a swift exchange of money among them.
We ended on bad terms; he still owes me two grand, which he once wanted to pay but then, ahem, forgot. If that's the cost of not having to know him, cheap.