Everyone always says the previous developer was crap, sometimes you're right

This code review gave me eye cancer.

So, first of all, let me apologize to anyone impacted by eye cancer, if that really is a thing... because that sounds absolutely horrible. But, believe me, this code was absolutely horrible, too.

I was asked to code review another team's script. I don't like reviewing code from other teams, as I'm pretty "intense" and a nit-picker -- my own team knows and expects this, but I tend to really piss off other people who don't expect my level of input on "what I really think" about their code...

So, I get this script to review. It's over 200 lines of bash (so right away, it's fair game for a boilerplate "this should be re-written in python" or similar reply)... but I dive in to see what they sent.

My eyes.

My eyes.

MY EYES.

So, I certainly cannot violate IP rules and post any of the actual code here (be thankful - be very thankful), but let me just say, I think it may be the worst code I've ever seen. And I've been coding and code-reviewing for upwards of 30 years now. And I've seen a LOT of bad code...

I imagine the author of this script was a rebellious teenager who found the google shell scripting style guide and screamed "YOU'RE NOT MY REAL DAD!" at it and then set out to flagrantly violate every single rule and suggestion in the most dramatic ways possible.

Then they found every other style guide they could, and violated all THOSE rules, too. Just because they were there.

Within the same script... within the SAME CODE BLOCK... 2-space indentation... 4-space indentation... 8-space indentation... TAB indentation... and (just to be complete) NO indentation (entire blocks of code within another function of conditional block, all left-justified, no indentation at all).

lowercase variable/function names, UPPERCASE names, underscore_separated_names, CamelCase names, and every permutation of those as well.

Comments? Not a single one to be found, aside from a 4-line stanza at the top, containing a brief description of that the script did and (to their shame), the name of the author. There were, however, ENTIRE BLOCKS of code commented out.

[ In the examples below, I've replaced indentation spacing with '-', as I couldn't get devrant to format the indentation in a way to suitably share my pain otherwise... ]

Within just a few lines of one another, functions defined as...

function somefunction {
----stuff
}

Another_Function() {
------------stuff
}

There were conditionals blocks in various forms, indentation be damned...

if [ ... ]; then
--stuff
fi

if [ ... ]
--then
----some_stuff
fi

if [ ... ]
then
----something
something_else
--another_thing
fi

And brilliantly un-reachable code blocks, like:

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]; then
--SOME_VAR="blah"
fi

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]
----then
----SOME_VAR="foo"
fi

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]
--then
--echo "SOME_VAR must be set"
fi

Do you remember the classic "demo" programs people used to distribute (like back in the 90s) -- where the program had no real purpose other than to demonstrate various graphics, just for the sake of demonstrating graphics techniques? Or some of those really bad photo slideshows, were the person making the slideshow used EVERY transition possible (slide, wipe, cross-fade, shapes, spins, on and on)? All just for the sake of "showing off" what they could do with the software? I honestly felt like I was looking at some kind of perverse shell-script demo, where the author was trying to use every possible style or obscure syntax possible, just to do it.

But this was PRODUCTION CODE.

There was absolutely no consistency, even within 1-2 adjacent lines. There is no way to maintain this. It's nearly impossible even understand what it's trying to do. It was just pure insanity. Lines and lines of insanity.

I picture the author of this code as some sort of hybrid hipster-artist-goth-mental-patient, chain-smoking clove cigarettes in their office, flinging their own poo at their monitor, frothing at the mouth and screaming "I CODE MY TRUTH! THIS CODE IS MY ART! IT WILL NOT CONFORM TO YOUR WORLDLY STANDARDS!"

I gave up after the first 100 lines.

Gave up.

I washed my eyes out with bleach.

Then I contacted my HR hotline to see if our medical insurance covers eye cancer.

Reading other people's code.

bad code that works 👍

source: reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/

Maintaining software built by interns who have all quit by now and made zero documentation

i mean.. i know my code is bad, intellij, but u dont have to shove it in my face

I am a programmer and i have never written bad code

How it should be:
- First: solve the problem
- Second: Write your code.

How many people do:
- First: Write code
- Second: solve code problems
- Third: Adapt code with requirements
- Forth: get lost on your spaghetti code
- Sixth: make a suicide

Bad architecture causes more problems than bad code.

When you finally catch the person that's been writing bad code all the time

I have no words...

Future Teller: Your bad code and unhappy behavior will last till you're 30.

Me[curiously]: and after 30?

FT: You'll get used to it.

When your colleagues have no tests for their code and tell you not to touch it, because it WORKS!

Sometimes my code is so bad that it takes an entire family to debug it.

Is there a natural cure for eye cancer?

Journalist: How would you describe bad code?
Developer: "No comment"

It’s code like this that gives me severe migraines 🤯

Has anyone ever looked over the code that they wrote like two years ago and just felt embarrassed of how bad it is?

Callback hell?

Think about div hell

A good programmer can get more done than 10 bad programmers, but a bad programmer's code can keep 10 good programmers busy for years.
~ Ed Weissman

good code > bad code + good comments 🤔

We all know this feeling

If you thought your legacy code was bad, this is what I'm dealing with. The below SQL is stored in a cookie on login and executed to on every further request to determine the user / privileges.

I swear I didn't know that. Am I a bad programmer? Should I quit writing code?

If marketing is trying to code... -_-

Oh yes...

Story of my life...

when you had to maintain some stranger's shitty codebase, and you couldn't resist looking up his name on LinkedIn, then you found his profile which says he is a Rockstar coder

About two years ago I get roped into a something when someone was requesting an $8000 laptop to run an "program" that they wrote in Excel to pull data from our mainframe.

In reality they are using our normal application that interacts with the mainframe and screen scrapping it to populate several Excel spreadsheets.

So this guy kept saying that he needed the expensive laptop because he needed the extra RAM and processing power for his application. At the time we only supported 32 bit Windows 7 so even though I told him ten times that the OS wouldn't recognize more than 3.5 GB of RAM he kept saying that increasing the RAM would fix his problem. I also explained that even if we installed the 64 bit OS we didn't have approval for the 64 bit applications.

So we looked at the code and we found that rather than reusing the same workbook he was opening a new instance of a workbook during each iteration of his loop and then not closing or disposing of them. So he was running out of memory due to never disposing of anything.

Even better than all of that, he wanted a faster processor to speed up the processing, but he had about 5 seconds of thread sleeps in each loop so that the place he was screen scrapping from would have time to load. So it wouldn't matter how fast the processor was, in the end there were sleeps and waits in there hard coded to slow down the app. And the guy didn't understand that a faster processor wouldn't have made a difference.

The worst thing is a "dev" that thinks they know what they are doing but they don't have a clue.

<rant data-type="corny">

My Gf of 3 years left me for some douche. Thus said, she "removed" her feelings before kissing him. WTF! I didn't know feeling came like dependencies...

</rant>

How to write bad code

I feel a high amount of self rightiousnes

Today I got my programming test back. 50/50 points. I only deserved 40 of them, since I wrote horrible code, so I told the teacher "I don't understand my points." His reply: "I also don't understand." I was laughing for at least 5 minutes 😂

So I was at work and send to another location (distribution centers) and in the lunch break my guider for that day and I started a conversation about servers etc (he appeared to do loads of stuff with that). He recommended me all those programs but I didn't recognize anything so I asked him what kinda servers he ran. He runs a lot of Windows servers. No problem for me but I told him that I am into Linux servers myself.

Guy: "Linux guy, eh? That system is considered to be so secure but in reality it's insecure as fuck!".

Me: (If he would come up with real/good arguments I am not going to argue against that by the way!) Uhm howso/why would you think that?
Guy: "Well all those script kiddies being able to execute code on your system doesn't seem that secure.".

*me thinking: okay hold on, let's ask for an explanation as that doesn't make any fucking sense 😐*

Me: "Uhm how do you mean, could you elaborate on that?"

Guy: "Well since it's open source it allows anyone to run any shit on your system that they'd like. That's why windows rocks, it doesn't let outsiders execute bad code on it.".

Seriously I am wondering where the hell he heard that. My face at that moment (internally, I didn't want to start a heated discussion): 😐 😲.

Yeah that was one weird conversation and look on open source operating systems...

"So, how bad is the current code base?"

Dev: I regret nothing.
Me: Someone kill me before this kind of thing spreads.

“Don’t comment bad code—rewrite it.”
—Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plaugher

Can't fall asleep because of unfinished code...

Wake up at 03:00 AM because of nightmares about bad code...

Too tired to finish code or rewrite bad code :'(

Oh my god please stop this kind of coding

Oh I sure hate working on other people their code. This is one of the gems I found, but this project contains stuff worse than this. Literally most of the class names aren't even proper according to the naming conventions

When you're called in to fix another developer's terrible work.

Found this bad boy in our code just now:
From class SecurityService

public boolean checkAccess(Object obj) {
// TODO:
return true;
}

p.s. it's being used

Bad code 😂

Looking at old code is as bad as looking back at what you posted online years ago

I play this song every time when I check bad code

I'll never hate anyone's bad code as much as I hate my own bad code.

My CSS code in a nutshell

I am that colleague that writes bad quality code

Me today at class, doing a group work, while suddenly I saw my colleague’s code looking very odd.

Me : “Why is your code like that?”
Her : “Like what?”
Me : “Its not spaced correctly... look its way over there”
Her : “Oh well, I just like it like that, its my style”
Me “...”

And im just like, if she post her code at SO, she wouldve been eaten alive...

If you ever come across a Java codebase with capitalized method names, RUN. I should've taken this advice years ago.

Hello everyone, this is my first time here so hi! I want to tell you all a story about my current situation.

At 18 while in the military I was able to get my first computer, it was a small hp pavilion laptop with windows 7. The system would crash constantly, even though I would only use it for googling stuff and using fb to talk to people. 5 months after I got it and continuously hated it decided to find out why and who could I blame (other than myself) for the system making me do the ctrl alt del dance all the time....

Found out that there are people called computer programmers that made software. Decided to give it a go since I had some free time most days. Started out with c++ because it was being recommended in some websites. Had many "oh deeeeer lord" moments. After not getting much traction I decided to move to Java which seemed like an easier step than C++. Had fun, but after some verbosity I decided to move into more dynamic lands. Tried JS and since at the time there was no Node and I was not very into the idea of building websites I decided to move into Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl and had a really great time using and learning all of them. I decided to get good in theoretical aspects of computer programming and since I had a knack for math I decided to get started with basic computer science concepts.

I absolutely frigging loved it. And not only that, but learning new things became an obsession, the kind that would make me go to bed at 02:40 am just to wake up at 04:00 or 06:00 because the military is like that. I really wanted to absorb as much as I could since I wanted to go to college for it and wanted to be prepared since I did not wanted to be a complete newb. Took Harvard CS50, Standford Programming 101 with Java, Rice's Python course and MIT's Python programming class. I had so much fun I don't regret it one bit.
By the time I got to college I had already made the jump to Linux and was an adept Arch user, Its not that it was superior or anything, but it really forced me to learn about Linux and working around a terminal and the internals of the system to get what I want. Now a days I settle for Fedora or Debian based systems since they are easier and time is money.

Uni was a breeze, math was fun and the programming classes seemed like glorified "Hello World" courses. I had fun, but not that much fun, most of my time was spent getting better at actual coding. I am no genius, nor my grades were super amazing(I did graduate with honors though) but I had fun, which never really happened in school before that.

While in school I took my first programming gig! It was in ASP.NET MVC, we were using C#, I got the job through a customer that I met at work, I was working in retail during the time and absolutely hated it. I remember being so excited with the gig, I got to meet other developers! Where I am from there aren't that many and most of them are very specialized, so they only get concerned with certain aspects of coding (e.g VBA developers.....) and that is until I met the lead dev. He was by far one of the biggest assholes I had ever met in my life. Absolutely nothing that I would do or say made hem not be a dick. My code was steady, but I would find bugs of incomplete stuff that he would do, whenever I would fix it he would belittle me and constantly remind me of my position as a "junior dev" in the company saying things as "if you have an issue with my code or standards tell me, but do not touch the code" which was funny considering that I would not be able to advance without those fixes. I quit not even 3 months latter because I could not stand the dick, neither 2 of the other developers since the immediately resigned after they got their own courage.

A year latter I was able to find myself another gig. I was hesitant for a moment since it was another remote position in which I had already had a crappy experience. Boy this one was bad. To be fair, this was on me since I had to get good with Lumen after only having some exposure to Laravel. Which I did mentioned repeatedly even though he did offer to train me in order to help him. Same thing, after a couple of weeks of being told how much I did not know I decided to get out.

That is 2 strikes.

So I waited a little while and took a position inside another company that was using vanilla PHP to build their services. Their system was solid though, the lead engineer remains a friend and I did learn a lot from him. I got contracted because they were looking for a Java developer. The salary was good. But when I got there they mentioned that they wanted a developer in Java...to build Android. At the time I was using Java with Spring so I though "well how hard can this be! I already use Android so the love for the system is there, lets do this!" And it was an intense, fun and really amazing experience.

-- To be continued.

What the duck man? I need answers, not you popping your eyes over my bad code!

Yet another story from a dev friend of mine:

He was assigned to a client(he works at an agency, this was a new client) to add some trivial functionality(a share button) to their web app. It was planned as a short task(1 day).

Then he got the source code.
THEIR ENTIRE BACKEND WAS A SINGLE PHP 3 FILE with over 100000 LOC(He couldn't even open it in anything other then vim).
This monstrosity created all the HTML with inline styles everywhere&JS. State was determined with a whole bunch of cookies(one of which was 'admin' and GET parameters, which had no input sanitation whatsoever (obviously vulnerable to sqli).
And there were two comments in this
file:
"TODO: add documentation"
and
"Don't touch this"

When asked why this ungodly beast was created, the client said they didn't want to have long URLs, they wanted everything to be on index.php

1) WHY?
2) WHO WROTE THIS SHIT?
3) HOW?

At least they agreed to let my friends agency rebuild their website.

Also, why does my friend literally work with the shittiest I ever heard of?

Warning: long read....

I got a call this morning from a client who was panicking about not being able to login to his web panel.

So I went to the web panel and tried to login and was just redirected back to the login page. No errors or anything (at least visible on the page). Went looking for an error_log file and found it.

It turns out there was an error was showing: Disk quota exceeded.

So I went into the cPanel and checked, he used about 16GB out of 100GB and that got me confused. So I looked around and found out he was using about 510000/500000 inodes.

Went looking trough FTP to see where he has so many files and try and remove some.

Well it turns out that there were about 7 injected websites (warez, online casino, affiliate one etc) and a full hacking web panel on his FTP. After detailed analysis some who actually built the site (I just maintain some parts) made an upload form available to public with any checks on it. Meaning anyone could upload whatever they wanted and the form would allow it.

The worst part is that the client is not allowing us to secure the form with some sort of login or remove it completely (the best option) as it is not really needed but he uses it to upload some pdf catalogs or something.

TL; DR;
Old programmer created an upload form that was accessible to anyone on the web without adding any security or check as to see what kind of files was getting uploaded. Which lead to having maximum number on inodes used on server and client being unable to login.

Side note:
And ofc I had to go and fix the mess behind him again, even though he stopped working a long time ago and I started just recently and have been having nightmares of this project.

When the code is so bad that the only meaningful thing to do should be executing
rm -Rf *; git add -A; git commit -m "bugfix"
and then start the project again.

You know the code is in bad shape when you see variables starting with "get":

Integer getDataBlockSize;

Only bad code needs documenting...

bad code that works is bad code.

I’m surrounded by devs that use the light theme in IntelliJ. It triggers me more than any bad code 😂😂😂

Writing bad code has its perks.

Whenever you are hungry you only have to write a few lines of code and you get some spaghetti

I want one!

I comment my code. Thats considered a bad practice between some coders

This was on a key cutting machine at the range:
1) They use XP
2) They use Java
3) It was touch screen so I could have gotten up an on screen keyboard and actually used the command prompt

Before I learned how to code and people said that you should print hello world I thought they really meant hook it up to a printer and print it on paper

Sometimes dirty code is more efficient than clean code.

If features get dropped frequently and requirements change every few days, writing best-practices, tested code is wasted time. Learned that in my first job where I thought the other devs were all bad. Until I realized their bad code pays my salary, and my clean code takes more time to develop.

Do you guys know any Github repos with really Bad C++ code?

Just wanna see if I can understand it, as a test... 🤔

So Friday afternoon is always deployment time at my company. No sure why, but it always fucks us.

Anyways, last Friday, we had this lovely deployment that was missing a key piece. On Wednesday I had tested it, sent out an email(with screenshots) saying "yo, whoever wrote this, this feature is all fucked up." Management said they would handle it.

The response email. 1(out of 20) defects I sent in were not a defect but my error. No further response, so I assume the rest were being looked into.

In a call with bossman, my manager states that the feature is fixed, so I go to check it quickly before the deployment(on Friday).

THERE IS NO FUCKING CODE CHECK-IN. THE DEV BASTARD JUST SAID THAT MY USECASE WAS WRONG, SO MY ENTIRE EMAIL WAS INVALID.

I am currently working on Saturday, as the other guy refuses to see the problem! It is blatant, and I got 3 other people to reproduce to prove I am not crazy!

On top of that, the code makes me want to vomit! I write bad code. This is like a 3rd grader who doesn't know code copy-pasted from stack overflow! There is literally if(A) then B else if(!A) then B! And a for loop which does some shit, and the line after it closes has a second for loop that iterates over the same unaltered set! Why?! On top of that, the second for loop loops until "i" is equal to length-1, then does something! Why loop???

The smartest part of him ran down his Mama's leg when it saw the DNA dad was contributing!

Don't know who is the culprit, and if you happen to see this, I am pissed. I am working on Saturday because you can't check your code or you lied on your resume to get this job, as you are not qualified! Fuck you!

This guy who earns 20% more than me wrote a method to check which string of 2 is lexicographically smaller.

public boolean isSmaller(String s1, String s2) {
String [] temp = new String[2];
temp[0] = s1;
temp[1] = s2;
Collections.sort(temp);
if (temp[0].equalsIgnoreCase(s1)) {
return true;
}
else {
return false;
}
}

Found this gem yesterday...

function justNumber(BigDecimal n) {
  string negative_sign = "-";
  BigDecimal response = BigDecimal.valueOf(n.toString().replace(negative_sign, ""));
  return response;
}

I was asked by a client to code review their platform built in PHP. The platform was becoming slow and new features built by their current IT supplier broke existing features.

I gained access to the source code... One PHP file (index.php) containing about 80K lines of code... I am impressed and disgusted at the same time. 😂

When it's dark outside all the time and the sun suddenly comes around.

Everyone's going crazy about it and walking outside.

Me: FUCK. How am I supposed to read my freakin code like that?!

*Me standing up and closing the shutter*

In elementary my teacher gave me bad mark, because instead of painting house in Paint, I was trying to code

I’ve never made any of my code open source, because I’m afraid that it’s so freaking bad someone will bash me for it, but I’m really trying my best.

This meme is shit;
Code is never really "finished".

Did you fucking idiots think that I was gonna tell you to implement async await on the requests and not notice that you IMPLWMENTED GODDAMN SYSTEM-SLEEP YOU DESNE MOTHERFUCKEDS IT NOT TAKES 10X AS LONG AS MY OATCH TO JUST LIMIT THE NUMBER IF HTTP REQUESTS FOR FUCJS SAKE THIS CODE LOONS LIKE A RACCOON FUCKED AN MACBOOK THAT ALSO GOT FUCKED BY A GOAT FROM CHERNOBYL THAT SOMEHOW MUTATED TO A RACCOON GOAT 🐐 MACBOOK 💻 HYBRID ABOMINATION THAT IS NOW CLAWING MY EYES OUT AND GIVING ME RABIESCANCERAIDS

My frustrations with the industry

The best part about being a teaching assistant in programming is the ability to bitch about bad code.

The worst part is all the bad code...

Bad Java code is one thing. Bad objective-c code is like OHHHH MY GOD DUDE WTF ARE YOU DOINGGGGG

Found this in an old project of mine... I think I was fed up with some issues ^^'

found this today...

Having pets is a good way to prepare yourself for working in a brown-field environment.

When your cat or dog shits on the floor, you get the same feeling as when you need to dive into a legacy code base.

You know you can't just leave it there, and yet you still want to find anything else to do except for touch the pile of shit in the middle of the room.

Meanwhile you know your users are going to end up trampling over it and mashing it into your carpet.

Bad Code Is Like Boomerang....
Eventually It Will Comeback At You... 🤨

Not adding spaces in for statements.

ex) bad practice
for (i=0;i<10:i++)
{
//some code
}

ex) good practice
for (i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
//some code
}

Wonder which data structure they're using

Two questions:

Is over engineering code a good thing or a bad thing?

Is writing verbose code a good thing or a bad thing?

If I disregard all Wordpress code examples, this must have been one of the best examples of bad code. It took minutes to understand what it does.

Today I reached a point where I made an really bad looking, uneficient, unreadable function, but it works!, That's what counts right?!

Just kidding, I just couldn't fix it, hopefully the me from tomorrow will be smarter.

Last time I post my need-to-be-refactored code, I see some mean-but-useful comments.

Everyone's comments are like: "Look this stupid coder trying to be clever and write an idiotic code, let's bully him because we are better".

Ok guys, sorry for hurting your eyes, but please do it again...

I really want to know your opinion, especially on the part where I try to make the "if condition" more readable by defining some boolean variables.

When you see someone else's code:

It works.. I guess? 🤣🤣

When a repository has more forks than stars, there might be something wrong with that software..

That feeling when a coworker screws up totally. doesn't accept it as their fault.

You look at the code and see so much of redundancy and bad practice galore.

You look at it for a while and think you can rewrite it from scratch. But you finally end up saying "fuck this" and feel hopeless because there is not enough time.

Hate that feeling. Hate it. Depresses.

While working I was munching from a bowl of candy, suddenly realized my face hurt and hard to breathe. Emergency room....
I apparently ate something I'm allergic to while in a code fog.
No idea what it was yet.
Must have been bad code.

Me when looking at someone else's code.

(Sorry for bad fps, had to get it under 5mb)

Your code so bad even your rubber duck won't listen to that nonsense.

When you look back at Code from your 2nd year of university...

Using while loops as if statements to check for vowels... *shudders in fear*

When a senior developer changes your impeccable code and pushes their ugly indented lines with bad naming scheme without review.

Looking through our gitlog today and see 3 PR's from our "lead developer". 2 of these were removing a single blank line from a class, and the 3rd was adding one back in. None of these had any title or commit messages on the PR's. This is a guy that talks down to everyone and deliberately makes other devs feel insignificant, saying he's too busy to write documentation and it's not needed because his uncommented code is self documenting. But hang on he's not too busy to waste time with pointless non-functional PR's that only remove a couple of blank lines? Scratching my head in disbelief that some devs think they can get away with shit like this. How about you drop the ego and actually try and work in collaboration with the other devs.

After typeing this:

interface IDeviceTypeTraitPropertyPropertyDefintionMap {

I feel like I need to take my self out behind the shed, for the good of humanity...

When you try refactoring bad code you wrote a long time ago

while you all have a rubber duck to explain your code I have this bad boy😎

Note to myself: don't start writing algorithms at 2 am

Fuck the tests...

Is it bad practice to comment almost every line and every function of your code?

When a colleague asks me to take a look at his code.

Being a programmer in a scientific discipline can be infuriating.

using "no one" ="almost no one"
using everyone = "almost everyone"

1. No one knows what even the very idea of good practice is. And everyone refuses to learn. 3k lines of repetitive copy pasted main. 500 lines of plotting method.

2. Raw C-style pointer based array creation. Won't use develope array libraries because what if development stops. FUCKING HAVE YOU SEEN YOUR CODE WHAT IF DEVELOPMENT ON YOUR CODE STOPS. FUCK.

3. LOOP VARIABLES DECLARED AT THE BEGINNING OF THE METHOD WHY.

4. Everyone wants to make modular, independent code. No one wants to use OOP. NOPE. ALL IN ONE FILE. WRITE C++ LIKE A FUCKING PYTHON NOTEBOOK. FUCK.

5. LIBRARIES OH MY GOD PLEASE DO NOT CODE UP YOUR MATRIX MULTIPLICATION. PLEASE DO NOT TRIPLE LOOP IT. NO. THE LINEAR ALGEBRA LIBRARY WILL STAY IN DEVELOPMENT.

6. Please realize that literally not one comment over an 1800 line file does not help anyone.

FUCKING. WHY. WHY ARE WE SCIENTISTS SO GOOD AT SCIENCE AND SO FUCKING SHIT AT THE CODE THAT MAKES OUR SCIENCE HAPPEN. WHY. FUCKING. WHY. FUCK.

Try/Catch doesn't fix stupidty! OR BAD CODE!

So I've taken over a project, well, not really taken over, we've been hired to add more functionality to a Wordpress site.

I have never seen such a messy code in my life... variables have mixed languages, indentation is a mix of tabs, 2, 3 and 4 spaces, camelcase, snake case, short names, long names. ' and ", no spaces after commas (gotta save those bytes doode)
Almost like it has been copypasted from everywhere.

I think I said 10-15 hours for it. I think I will spend a lot more time tidying up this code.

Hey, look, 3 index files!!
index.php
index__backup.php
index__backup_2.php

I don't dare to look into the CSS or JS, but I know I have to

When you thought writing code on paper in university was bad, wait till you apply to Google and have one of your interviews writing code in Google docs.

Probably none but well bad one was Mozilla plugins reviewing my code . It took 2 days to review 100 lines of code !!!!.

"This code really sucks"
"Well it's not that bad"
"But there is a GOTO"
"Oh"

Worst code I ever had to touch: a React application, createClass era, before redux was a thing, that had everything in one fucking component.

Every fucking thing.

This was a simple video chat application, but still. The component's code included:

- Views (contact list and video call screen) and logic to switch between them;
- All application state;
- API calls;
- Websocket message handling;
- WebRTC logic (getUserMedia and p2p streaming).

This app was built by one person in one month for a demo. That person left the company after the demo and I had to maintain that mess without zero React knowledge (I was doing angular at that time). On his last day he gave me a crash course and an overview of how the app worked.

Around that time I attended a few meetups and a conference with talks about React. That, my curiosity and ability to learn by refactoring helped me a lot when I had to add new features and fix bugs in that app.

When you're too good to use the left hand side of the screen.

Asks help from the top student in my class. Answers "I'm really bad at debugging. My code always compiles the first time" 🙃

Does 11 hours a week make me a serial ranter, a rantophile or both?

For fucks sakes people.

Ocamms razor is a very helpful problem solving tool.

HOWEVER IT ISN'T AN EXCUSE FOR NOT HAVING A PROPER ARCHITECTURE, OR SHITTING ON IT, HAMMERING RANDOM IFs EVERYWHERE, USING A METRIC SHITTON OF MAGIC NUMBERS HAVING A LOT OF REDUNDANT CODE AND ZERO DOCUMENTATION!
YOU CAN'T DO THAT "just because it's the simplest solution"! NO. THAT'S JUST UNACCEPTABLE. YOU ARE A HORRIBLE PERSON.

GO TO HELL YOU STUPID SCUM WITH YOUR PILE OF CHOPSTICKS BURNING THAT IS YOUR CODEBASE!
But before that, would you mind touching these two wires definitely not connected to the mains?

Knockout JS.
I am not sure if the library itself is so bad or the code which I was working on was ugly. But since then I avoid anything that is related to knockout js.

&nbsp; - Everyone abused it to create empty space 😂

if you're gona write huge monolithic, 1 file, 1000s of lines, code...at least have the gusto to go all or nothing

don't carve out function after function, for actions only called once, and end up having 100 functions.

or were you trying to reach 69 "static void"s ?

As friends are

I feel so bad for the Devs of this app, they can't make up bullshit excuses and not bug test their code like other Devs can

Java's garbage collector is so bad that if it was good it would have collected all of my code!!

public class Main {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Hello, World!");
}
}

sorry for my messy code

I was looking at some poorly written code today in a project and I was curious to see who wrote it. I blamed it and found I had wrote it 6 months ago! smh Well... at least I know I'm getting better! I ended up refactoring it to use better code patterns.

Trying to add Google oauth to an old app on a client's request. God I hate past me.

Co-Workers. When I see their bad code and instantly know: "No, that's not the way to do it."

I'm hoping it's not just me, but whenever I'm using a website or mobile app, and see something badly designed I get very angry...

You're a great coder only if you can deliberately write bad code that works but no one can understand.

If you do this, please, don't have children.

P.D. count the number of *if*s

When you just need 2 points more for that rubber duck and you need the duck zo bad :/

"rubber duck why wont my code compile"
~squeek
"... "

just wrote this.

:D i know i will not solve this for a long time

Found this beauty in the source code of visual studio code...

Friend asks you to hack another friend's Instagram "cause you know how to code, right" == bad.

Friend asks you to hack their own Instagram cause they forgot their password == bad++

First time I was screaming out of anger while looking at code.
I'm doing a group project in my university.
We are developing a indoor navigation Android app.
And a team mate of mine just merged this…

/*Method for help-feature.
Sets all the TouchEvents that are at least 400 ms long. This is made for all the relevant buttons or editTexts, which are seen on the mapView.
The case for mapView is needed because otherwise the other buttons, etc. wont work properly.*/

public void setButtonsForHelpDialog(){
View v = mapView;
switch (v.getId()) {
case R.id.mapview:
mapView.setOnTouchListener(…);
case R.id.buttonUp:
buttonOn.setOnTouchListener(…);
case R.id.buttonDown:
buttonDown.setOnTouchListener(…);
…
case R.id.description:
description.setOnTouchListener(…);
}}

The code is really aligned like this - no breaks. And it's even worse. There are if statements like if("constantly false var" == true). Which is highlighted by Android Studio.
This is done in a own class. The views are set via public member variables of this new class. The constant vars were added in the actual class holding the buttons and also stuff like this useless method
public void getDoStuff() {
doStuff()
}
And I could continue like this.

I never saw code this bad…
I can't even find words for it :/

Come up with a bad version of flipping a bool's value. (value = !value)

I'll start with a bad way of doing it in C# (.NET):

char[] bca = boolWert.ToString();
if (bca.Length == 4 && bca[0] == 't' && bca[1] == 'r' && bca[2] == 'u' && bca[3] == 'e')
{
boolWert = !bool.Parse($"{bca[0]}{bca[1]}{bca[2]}{bca[3]}");
}
else if (bca.Length == 5 && bca[0] == 'f' && bca[1] == 'a' && bca[2] == 'l' && bca[3] == 's' && bca[4] == 'e')
{
boolWert = !bool.Parse($"{bca[0]}{bca[1]}{bca[2]}{bca[3]}{bca[4]}");
}
else throw new Exception("y e s");

What do you call poorly written code? The most common one is probably spaghetti, but here in Finland it's often called 'purkka' which means chewing gum, perhaps because it's sticky and difficult to get out of your hair.

Found this in a third party library once. Only thing I can think is that this programmer was paid by the line. Because, seriously, this could have been one line.

Programming commandment: Thou shall blame all bad code on thy comrade who has bequeathed your company!

That moment when you want to stop reviewing bad coder's code. Or else, you'll go nuts.

Some of us have co-worker who never wrote comment in their code.

When the code is so spaghetti that just wish you could make bolognese with it

Nothing is more relaxing then finding some really bad code and clean it up in your free time with music in background. Love this kind of Friday's.

It's a constant battle of getting the code finished, and having it look readable. It's so easy to fall into the downward spiral of bad coding.

Being told code is "production ready" only to find this:
if name == 'foo' or name == 'bar' or name == 'someothershit'
What's wrong with:
if name in ['foo','bar', 'someothershit']?

Oh and they had 10 different values they were matching, not just 3. What kind of joker am I dealing with?

I just hate it when a co-worker says "AS LONG AS IT WORKS. It doesn't matter how you code it as long as it outputs what the client/user wants. They don't check how you code it anyway" *facepalm*

We effin' follow standards so that it will be convenient for everybody!

Bad code is still bad code if you don't follow standards even if it works.

If got to do some bugfixing at work today.
Looking through code:

if (x !== undefined || x !== null){

I want the person who wrote this to wear the ugliest and scratchiest christmas sweater with "i write bad code" written on it

Life's too short to write bad code... but then what puts the food on the table?

One of those "What the fuck am I doing?" moments.

So I got this new job as Java developer, the people are really great but is the kind of companies that only takes care for fast results and not for code quality.

Because this I have to deal with libraries updated 4 years ago, classes with 8000 lines, methods with 500 lines, a WHOLE lot of work arounds because there is no time to really fix the issue unless it affects directly the customer (something not working or being really slow) aaand we use fucking svn.

Some of this practice's they know and encourage it (+1000 lines classes for example) and every time I try to talk about good practices in the code everyone seems so interested but there is always no time.

Sooo I will stay here for at least two years, I hope I can make a change for good in their code smells.

My current boss and soon to be on-site boss marked me as 'God of Code'.

Is that good/normal/bad?

How to deal with legacy code when you see such thing:

if function() == !!!false

1. Ctrl+A
2. Del
3. rm -rfv /

Actual production code:
while(1):
//A few lines of code here with a conditional break.
while(1):
//More code.

Have you ever just had nested infinite loops...

Ok.

When the WYSIWYG editor needs to go back to school for coding.

<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br></span>

How is that even useful!?

Some days I feel like drinking to forget the bad legacy code Ive seen.

Copy and pasting from internet.

Without fully understanding the code.

Your spaghetti code is so bad that even Gordon Ramsay still has nightmares from it.

$a = 1;
$b = 2;
echo ($a < $b) ? ($a > $b) ? 'This is totally fine' : ($a < $b) ? 'This is not ok!' : 'Perfect' : 'No problem here';

Why do people do this?!

(And I mean nested ternary ifs, not coding in PHP :P)

As a rookie programming, I wrote really bad code and didn't understand why. Now, I've improved to where I know bad code, but I continue writing studios horrible solutions. And in the end up refactoring much until I don't have energy to look at my code anymore. This although knowing what I should/shouldn't do. Shame!

When I start writing test cases for my own code.
Me: wahi hua jis ka dar tha!

Good Idea: Code Reviews

Bad Idea: Code Reviews before your first sip of coffee.

I think I'm a good developer. I have pretty decent debugging skills, including pulling apart disassembled x86 and other architecture code.

I'm fascinated by how things work.

But almost everything is catered for by a library. Or has already been done.

I find it enjoyable to create a library or program myself, but get disheartened when I find some library or program that is written seemingly very well, compared to my own code. And then I start to think I'm not a good developer after all.

Sort of relates to my previous rant about repeatedly rewriting code.

Applies to me doing programming as a hobby but probably affects my code at work as well... I just can't help but think my code is probably awful compared to what someone else might write.

...then I see incredibly ugly, messy, badly written code by other people and I feel better...

I suppose it is like an artist who sees amazing works but cannot paint to that standard, but is well beyond drawing stick figures with crayons.

Sounds like a trivial problem but it probably impedes my progress with a lot of things.

Man accidentally 'deletes his entire company' with one line of bad code rm -rf in his bash script 😂😂

Today I submitted one of the worst PR's of my life.
We have to use a service which was developed sometime during the cold war and we query data from it. The exchange is soap.
When you just query the service, it returns over 50k lines of gibberish.
It would stand to reason thay a flag called include X information set to false in the request would eliminate only that section(largest of those 50k). Well... not really...
What actually happens is that everything except the basic information gets excluded once you apply a filter. In order to get the rest of the necessary data, you have to specify flags with the value of 'true' for each section. There are over twenty sections.
Long story short, my pr was over twenty lines of 'setX(true)'. It's horrible and I hate myself for doing it but at least the 50k lines are down top 911 useful ones.

Also, the company that still maintains this crap said that this is perfectly ok. 😐

Stop commenting out code blocks!

Either fix your shit or delete it.

I am open to argue what fixing may mean, as it is perfectly fine to make your broken code not reachable, e.g. via feature flags or skipping certain tests. Yet never ever should you comment those blocks!

So you say you want to keep it for historic reasons? You know, that is why we use version control! If you ever need certain functionality back, you can restore that state.

Each decent IDE also offers a local history where you can even restore code blocks that weren't even pushed or committed. So use that!

Commenting out test cases is a really bad habit, as you have no reminder that you shall restore it.

And no, a TODO and a FIXME won't count as a reminder as you have to actively look for them. And we all know how well that goes, don't we? (One time, I found a typo of a `TDO`. So even with a regular lookup for TODO, stuff will slip.)

Each test suite offers you ways to skip tests if there are valid reasons why they should not fail the build temporary and they offer colorful feedback. Yes, that means that your tests won't be green, but guess what: That's a feature! They shouldn't be.

That yellow is a fine reminder, aka warning!, that you should really fix your shit.

Commented code screams: "I DON'T KNOW WHAT I WAS DOING!" and it confuses the hell out of other developers ("Was this commented because of debugging purposes and should be active again or can I safely delete this!?") and adds verbose crap to the code base.

If you find yourself to be in a place that you comment code a lot, I also argue that your workflow is broken.

When you are using a decent debugger, there shouldn't that much of a need to comment in and out a lot of code in order to reason about your code-base.

Bad code is bad code. Whitespace isn't going to help you decipher what it means.

Last year I wrote a sudoku program which did solve easy sudokus but messed up on harder ones. I had got bored after a bit and forgot about it until today I thought I'd rewrite it using new stuff I've learned since and make it work properly.

So I opened it up and look and I'm like 'WHAT!?' because I don't understand what I wrote. After a bit I start to get the idea and see that it was kind of smart even if long and complicated.

If anything, it shows how much my documentation skills have improved.

Now I just have to work out how to redo it in a way I understand.

Sometimes I write bad code and feels guilty about it. Am I the only one who does like that?

I can’t understand why every time I work for a multimillionaire company that sells their product to thousands of companies, when I start to debug this fucking product it crashes because of the absence of simple input checks... wtf

“Can’t divide by zero”
“Null everywhere”

When you're reviewing code so bad it would have been easier to just write it yourself...

When your app is full of bad code

Agile coach Agiling: We shouldn't need code reviews as long as there is pair programming.

Me Internally: bad code + bad code doesn't make good code :(

"I don't write code to feel bad, I write bad code but I feel good!"

No, the language is not stupid :) No, it is not a problem of the language, it's just the fact that you don't really understand how to use it properly :) i think this is something each of us hates to hear while frustated but needs to hear afterwards, bad design is a posibility tho, but 99.999% of the cases is our fault. face it, nd overcome it! and finally, to grow beyond it 😄

<<edited with my potato phone's standard image editor>>

I do not think that GoTo is bad. It can lead to hellish code but if you don't misuse it - it can be extremely useful.

That feeling when you think your workflow is bad and happens to see"Professional" Degree level team of coders writing crap code with even crappier workflow

When you get c-python ipc through raw shared memory manipulation:

Automatically clean up code, removing redundant and duplicate bits, splitting large functions, and formatting it nicely. Especially useful when trying to understand some garbage code someone else wrote which you need to rewrite.