13
Voxera
5y

One of my worst WFT moments was just over 2 years ago.

A former colleague had been tasked with “upgrading” our solution for handling customer specific CSS on our platform for building newsletter emails.

He had been with us for about 5 years and ported most of the front end gui over that time from classic asp to .net and C#.

This work started in November and with a pause over dec-mid jan for high season and Christmas leave he continued.

In the beginning if mars we had the first of multiple WTF on that when I realized that his solution required a lot of special CSS or rather LESS, more than the a actual HTML for the template, and all was custom less rules that was very hard to understand.

We found that he actually never really understood how LESS worked and had tried to do things in a very backward way. Another colleague jumped in and manage to clean it up a bit so it got down to manageable levels.

Then in the end of Mars came the next bigger WTF. This is a newsletter building application. Turns out the new LESS based solution was entirely dependent on the js version of LESS and only worked when running in the browser. Guess what, the email send engine is not a browser and css classes and rules generally does not work in emails.

The new solution was impossible to integrate with the part that built and sent the emails without some very heavy rework.

Oh, and it was also completely incompatible with 12 years of old newsletters and customer templates that just did not work.

And of cause, he had not shown any of this in code reviews but rather just merged it part by part to the new version branch interleaving it with 5 months of other work.

He left the company short after.

Comments
  • 0
    Wait, how is Less.js not compatible? Yes, you'd have to split actions up and build it before sending, but how was it not comp outside of this case? :/
  • 8
    Wait, you started working on CSS and ended up on Mars? That's a legit WTF!
  • 2
    She means March.
  • 1
    @cst1992 yes, wrong language for autocorrect :/
  • 0
    @xewl try running it serverside without a js engine.

    We do not use node.js or any other server side js engine in our application

    And adding one would require changes to our deployment.
  • 2
    @Voxera
    When using less, you're going to have to use something server sided anyhow.. You can't just send out the plain Less, which is a given. Sad that this wasn't catched upon, but I'm sure there was a reason for this kind of deployment by him.. be it incompetence from him or a superior..

    eg. http://www.dotlesscss.org
  • 1
    @cst1992 I know. Just wanted to goof on her 🤣
  • 2
    @xewl he was incompetent in some areas but good with visual design.

    But no, management should not have let him into backend.

    And as I said, a few months after this he left because he could not handle the lash back he got when management found out the problems he caused.
  • 2
    @Voxera He should've at least had code checks, instead of just deploying this . It could've worked, if he worked closer together with the backend people...
  • 1
    @xewl that was his major flaw, he could not handle criticism no matter how well founded, which is why he skipped any review. And since I was occupied on another project I did not see it until it was to late.

    We did have quite a few arguments about his habits but since his work was more visible and in the visible part pretty good, any criticism was shrugged of by management.
  • 1
    @Voxera I know that very fucking feel very well. Grmbl
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