Unrestrained Creations

While reading news, I came across with Kowloon Walled City which exists no more.
After searching a little bit, now I know Kowloon Walled City was a huge concrete structure. Having working inner mechanisms, it was un-auditable, uncontrolled home for thousands. It had markets, ateliers, barber-shops inside. All located on maze-like narrow passages. It was unrestrained, so crime rate, corruption rate was high.

Kowloon Walled City was demolished from 1993 to 1994. It had a population of 50k residents while it was to be demolished.

As I read, I understand this structure was a little kingdom inside Hong Kong city. Searching about its history, we see how a living place can turn into a sink of iniquity.

Frankly, it made me remember those projects which start unstructured, unplanned and grows to become a code junk.

One of the earliest projects I worked on after graduation was a real mess. Many different developers worked on that project and without any control. Various technologies were applied without conformance.

Overall, it was a Java project - looking like a Java project indeed. IMHO it was a total spaghetti :)

For example; at least 3 different object-relational mapping technologies were used. Different parts of the project were accessing the same database using a different ORM framework! Holy Kaw! Lacking any guidance or conduct, every developer unquestioningly put a brick on that project and it became something like a Kowloon Walled City.

On the flipside, that was a good experience for me to understand what a project shouldn’t be, should not become like a Kowloon Walled City.

After a decade, I hope it was demolished, too. :)

Demographic and structural information about Kowloon Walled City can be found in this video.