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

You know it's bad when Github finds it necessary to tell you your code is trash

I am a programmer and i have never written bad code

Me, a junior dev: * reports an important issue and a possible fix *

Senior dev 1: nah, it'll do just fine.

Senior dev 2: that won't be an issue, don't you see? It's under control, man.

Senior 3: why are you even here? Why are you even talking?

Manager: yeah, what could possibly go wrong?

* a year after releasing the product, one of the seniors got fired and another one was hired *

New senior: this thing is bananas, code is inconsistent and there's memory leaks everywhere, how does that even work?

Me: nobody believed me when I said that.

Manager: it did work very well, where's the issue?

Me: it's everywhere, goddammit! Don't you see?

New senior: junior dev is right.

Me: I've been a WHOLE YEAR saying that!

Manager: did you? Really? Nah, you didn't.

...

I'm tired of this shit.

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

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

Bad architecture causes more problems than bad code.

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.

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

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

Is there a natural cure for eye cancer?

Callback hell?

Think about div hell

We all know this feeling

good code > bad code + good comments 🤔

Sometimes I wish I was allowed to just strangle my colleagues...

Example from the 'code base':

try:
do_something()
except Exception as e:
log(e)
do_something()

When I asked why they would redo the same call right after it failed I was told that 'It works the second time because it takes time to raise the Exception '.

Bitch, you've got a race condition in your sensitive banking software. You know it's there. Do you really want to trust the time needed to raise your exception will always be enough to synch that dumpster fire you call code?
Show some fucking respect for your craft and fix that shit. But of course they won't, because it will work flawlessly until it suddenly stops working. Taking down who knows what in this damn, undocumenred monolith with it....

Sometimes I'm honestly afraid to trust banks with my money.

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...

How can I un-see this 😑😑

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

<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>

I feel a high amount of self rightiousnes

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.

How to write bad code

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...

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

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

Less a rant, more just a sad story.

Our company recently acquired its sister company, and everyone has been focused on improving and migrating their projects over to our stack.

There's a ton of material there, but this one little story summarizes the whole very accurately, I think. (Edit: two stories. I couldn't resist.)

There's a 3-reel novelty slot machine game with cards instead of the usual symbols, and winnings based on poker-like rules (straights and/or flushes, 2-3 of a kind, etc.) The machine is over a hundred times slower than the other slot machines because on every spin it runs each payline against a winnings table that exhastively lists every winning possibility, and I really do mean exhaustively. It lists every type of win, for every card, every segment for straights, in every order, of every suit. Absolutely everything.

And this logic has been totally acceptable for just. so. long. When I saw someone complaining in dev chat about how much slower it is, i made the bloody obvious suggestion of parsing the cards and applying some minimal logic to see if it's a winning combination. Nobody cared.

Ten minutes later, someone from the original project was like "Hey, I have an idea, why don't we do it algorithmically to not have a 4k line rewards table?"

He seriously tried stealing a really bloody obvious idea -- that he hadn't had for years prior -- and passing it off as his own. In the same chat. Eight messages below mine. What a derpballoon.

I called him out on it, and he was like "Oh, is that what you meant by parsing?" 🙄

Someone else leaped in to defend the ~128x slower approach, saying: "That's the tech we had." You really didn't have a for loop and a handful of if statements? Oh wait, you did, because that's how you're checking your exhaustive list. gfj. Abysmal decisions like this is exactly why most of you got fired. (Seriously: these same people were making devops decisions. They were hemorrhaging money.)

But regardless, the quality of bloody everything from that sister company is like this. One of the other fiascos involved pulling data from Facebook -- which they didn't ever even use -- and instead of failing on error/unexpected data, it just instantly repeated. So when Facebook changed permissions on friends context... you can see where this is going. Instead of their baseline of like 1400 errors per day, which is amazingly high, it spiked to EIGHTEEN BLOODY MILLION PER DAY. And they didn't even care until they noticed (like four days later) that it was killing their other online features because quite literally no other request could make it out. More reasons they got fired. I'm not even kidding: no single api request ever left the users' devices apart from the facebook checks.

So.
That's absolutely amazing.

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

When a Frontend dev turns hacker.

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

Bad code 😂

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

Who encodes a whole gif inside the main CSS of a multifolder JS app without any documentation as to what it is? My university, that's who.

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

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

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.

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...

When the code is so bad, that the debugging duck hangs itself.

Found this in a legacy codebase at work. Can't imagine what the coder was thinking. "Just in case"?

I am that colleague that writes bad quality code

Fond this gem in a sample code at uni...
Noice 👌👌👌

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

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

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.

Only bad code needs documenting...

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.

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

bad code that works is bad code.

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

A journalist asked a programmer :-
What makes code bad ?

No comment.

I want one!

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

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;
}
}

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!

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. 😂

For those of you tired of boring old div soup, one of my classmates has some new and innovative span soup for you to try!

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.

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*

My frustrations with the industry

Bad Code

Found this gem yesterday...

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

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

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

I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.

I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.

We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.

The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.

We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.

It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.

Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.

But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.

I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.

But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.

Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.

They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.

I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this

Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.

I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.

But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.

... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.

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...

Two questions:

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

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

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.

All the noob jokes about "tee hee I write such bad code exdee" fucking drive me nuts.

There are absolutely such things as good codebases, in any language. By posting "tee hee funny relatable" "memes" about your shitass code you just make yourself look like a fucking idiot who excuses poor quality with "haha so relatable!" bullshit excuses.

Thank you for being the literal cancer of the industry, oversaturating the markets and making all of our managers think we're fucking idiot babies that have to be wrangled like cats in order to get a single feature out the door, devoid of rational thought or a modicum of expertise.

Fuck you. You're the problem. Be better or find another profession where slacking off is acceptable.

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

found this today...

One of my former coworkers was either completely incompetent or outright sabotaging us on purpose. After he left for a different job, I picked up the project he was working on and oh my God it's a complete shitshow. I deleted hundreds of lines of code so far, and replaced them with maybe 30-40 lines altogether. I'm probably going to delete another 400 lines this week before I get to a point where I can say it's fixed.

He defined over 150 constants, each of which was only referenced in a single location. Sometimes performing operations on those constants (with other constants) to get a result that might as well have been hard-coded anyway since every value contributing to that result was hard-coded. He used troublesome and messy workarounds for language defects that were actually fixed months before this project began. He copied code that I wrote for one such workaround, including the comment which states the workaround won't be necessary after May 2019. He did this in August, three months later.

Two weeks of work just to get the code to a point where it doesn't make my eyes bleed. Probably another week to make it stop showing ten warnings every time it builds successfully, preventing Jenkins from throwing a fit with every build. And then I can actually implement the feature I was supposed to implement last month.

Wonder which data structure they're using

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

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:

my vs code looks like having a bad trip recently.

It works.. I guess? 🤣🤣

Literally whole dev world: DRY - Don't Repeat Yourself
My Company: DRY - Do Repeat Yourself

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

*squirming in bed*
If it ain't broke don't fix it.. If it ain't broke don-WHAT THE FUCK IS "payment.needed2"??
Calm down, it's just some bad code but it works, you didn't write it, it's not your probl-WHY THE FUCK DO THE IF STATEMENTS HAVE SO MANY DUPLICATED LINES??

Sleep. Just sleep.

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.

Fuck the tests...

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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😎

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.

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

After typeing this:

interface IDeviceTypeTraitPropertyPropertyDefintionMap {

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

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.

Yep, this code is in production....

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

Do you ever cringe on the code you've written a few years before?
When I started as an intern in the same company I'm working for now, I was a solo dev on an internal tool.
It's web based and used for employee management.
I've cloned the repo to see how I did.
And to say the least, I wish I had an experienced dev to oversee me...
I'll never leave an intern unattended from now on if I know about them.

While working on my localization algorithm, I also set up a baseline I can compare my results to. I chose AMCL which is the go-to localization package everyone uses in ROS.
I took a peek at their code and found this atrocity - "ad hoc weighting scheme" where probabilities that are not mutually exclusive are added together, and also taken to the power of 3 because why the hell not!

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

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

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

Must nearly every recently-made piece of software be terrible?

Firefox runs terribly slowly on a four-core 1.6GHz processor when given eight (8) gigabytes of RAM. Discord's user interface is awfully slow and uses unnecessary animations. Google's stuff is just falling apart; a toaster notification regarding MRO stock was recently pushed such that some markup elements of this notification were visible in the notification, the download links which are generated by Google Drive have sometimes returned error 404, and Google's software is overall sluggish and somewhat unstable. Today, an Android phone failed to update the Google Drive application... and failed to return a meaningful error message. Comprehensive manuals appear to be increasingly often not provided. Microsoft began to digest Windows after Windows XP was released.

Laziness is not virtuous.

For all computer programs, a computer program should be written such that this computer program performs well on reasonably terrible hardware... and kept simple. The UNIX philosophy is woefully underappreciated.

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

sorry for my messy code

As friends are

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.

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

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 ?

The people who allow bad code to pass through the review process are the biggest menace to humanity.

This is definitely a total first world problem but I am so frustrated.

I am stuck in a team that embodies the Japanese proverb "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down".

The management are there because it is convenient and flexible and have no interest in managing or keeping up with tech.
The lead developers are extremely anti-social and are not approachable and the this stems down to the devs (not all but really most) - all there just to do the bare minimum and spend most of their energies in trying to avoid work or having learn something.

Unfortunately I am passionate about what I do and want to build high-quality products and this has put me at odds with the way things work.

I could fill up alot of time talking about how I was ordered to "cut" images/icons out of PDFs rather just getting them from the branding team, or how I was scolded for having set up logging, detected a problem caused by another developer and fixed it before it cost a big client a massive amount of money... But really the point is that I have never worked somewhere with such an awful attitude to enthusiasm and quite frankly it boggles my mind trying to understand how they rationalise these things but the answer is always laziness.

Obviously there are worse problems in the world than working in a job where you are encouraged to do nothing... But it actually really depresses me and causes anxiety that I am working with people who don't care about testing or monitoring or learning new things or even collaboration.

...sigh...

Hopefully the job market will start opening again soon

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 :/

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...

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

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.

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.

just wrote this.

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

When the code is so spaghetti that just wish you could make bolognese with 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");

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Yeah, this is why we don't do chaining...

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

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.

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.

Beings of Devrant - what makes a person a bad programmer?

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

My first job and the amount of bad code I had to work with influenced my coding style a lot.
One thing is reading about bad examples. Another thing is it to maintain these bad examples.

Why are most developers/software engineers so absolutely fucking shit at their craft?

I understand incompetence exists in every occupation but it seems in development the ratio of bad developers to good developers is like 9:1. There’s a serious lack of quality in this industry and it’s only further exacerbated by coding bootcamps and orgs like general assembly pumping out more dog shit

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

if function() == !!!false

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

Found this beautiful piece of code, that I wrote apparently a year ago .... oh my 😂 🤦‍♂ 😅
If I could travel back in time, I would would slap myself for doing this. Although I remember, why I did this, because of many min()/max() operations that I needed. I wanted to keep the code, so that I would know, which code piece belonged to which part, but man ... is that badly written! Nowadays with Clean Code style, I would certainly do it differently.

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

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

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?

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

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.

Copy and pasting from internet.

Without fully understanding the code.

And then, looking for the source of a bug in the code .... I randomly found this:

public bool IsOperationStarted { get; set; }

public bool IsOperationStartedTrue
{
get { return IsOperationStarted == true; }
}

public bool IsOperationStartedFalse
{
get { return IsOperationStarted == false; }
}

Ok.

There should be a developer licence so we could stop these stupid wannabes from getting into and ruining the industry with their shit work. We're so fed up maintaining these stupid codes the company previously outsourced somewhere on earth.

$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)

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

Good Idea: Code Reviews

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

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

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

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. 😐

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”

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

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...

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.

When your app is full of bad code

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

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!

I need guidance about my current situation.
I am perfectionist believing in OOP, preventing memory leak in advance, following clean code, best practices, constantly learning about new libraries to reduce custom implementation & improve efficiency.
So even a single bad variable name can trigger my nerves.

I am currently working in a half billion $ IT service company on a maintenance project of 8 year old Android app of security domain product of 1 of the top enterprise company of the world, which sold it to the many leading companies in the world in Govt service, banking, insurance sectors.

It's code quality is such a bad that I get panic attacks & nightmares daily.

Issues are like
- No apk obfuscation, source's everything is openbook, anybody can just unzip apk & open it in Android Studio to see the source.
- logs everywhere about method name invoked,
- static IV & salt for encryption.
- thousands of line code in God classes.
- Irrelevant method names compared to it's functionality.
- Even single item having list takes 2-3 seconds to load
- Lag in navigation between different features' screens.
- For even single thing like different dimension values for different density whole 100+ lines separate layout files for 6 types of densities are written.
- No modularized packages, every class is in single package & there are around 100+ classes.

Owner of the code, my team lead, is too terrified to change even single thing as he don't have coding maturity & no understanding of memory leak, clean code, OOP, in short typical IT 'service' company mentality.

Client is ill-informed or cost-cutting centric so no code review done by them in 8 years.

Feeling much frustrated as I can see it's like a bomb is waiting to blast anytime when some blackhat cracker will take advantage of this.

Need suggestions about this to tackle the situation.

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 :(

Today the government from Costa Rica announced their solution to tax double any UBER charge registered to debit/credit cards.

Their logic is to pretty much do it for any commerce that includes the letters UBER. Like something out of your first Unity C++lesson