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Search - "hard coded paths"
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I started my internship at the end of the year..
Fuck my ass!!! This code I have to work with is a huge pile of shit.
The code base I need to work with is around 40k LOC. It is a mixture of C++, C, Java, Python, Bash and I think I saw some lonely js files around.
A list of awesome parts:
- Paths are hard coded.
- Redundant code everywhere
- No documentation or inline comments available
Most of the comments in the code are just old code that is not used anymore. But the cherry on the turd is the class that should provide all kind of useful functions in my daily routine. About ninety percent of the functions have the same description or nothing. Sometimes a function name says "readSomethingFromSomewhere" but instead it writes something to a file. It is really confusing and I need to check everything twice instead of rely on what the function name promises.
I have also learned why copy paste isn't that good. The brief descriptions of every method in a files are always the same.
getName() - Description: Fork child process
getIp() - Description: Fork child process
getIpv6() - Description: Fork child process.
Surprise: None of these functions forks a child process. :D
Another awesome feature is the thing that they store up to five different versions of libraries. Everyone with slight modifications but no hint which one you need to use. Sometimes it is the newest, sometimes the oldest which is running in production. Another case of try and error.
Oh and my dev machine is a potato with a power supply and a fan. I started with NetBeans and every time I compiled the code it sounds like the machine wants to lift off and leave for a better place. (At this point I switched to Emacs and everything runs smoothly now)
At first I thought that I'm just not that good at coding and understanding a big project from scratch but some colleagues have the same problem. The whole system is very inflexible and it is all about "std::cout"-debugging to check if your changes do what you want them to do.
Currently I'm just trying to fix this mess to make the life for the next student or employee easier. The first month was just frustrating as hell. I need to ask so many questions and most of the time the answer was "I don't know, haven't touched this code in years". Needless to say that my progress isn't that awesome but at least I get a nice payment for 20 hours of work a week.2 -
Yay, I have to rewrite + design a 15-20 year old website 🎉
Originally written in, God knows what version of php, HTML and JS by a Java dev, and patched every other year when something broke or a new feature was needed, every time by someone new...
Some years ago the system was moved from a Windows host to Ubuntu and that was a nightmare in its own, because of all the hard-coded paths...
Welp, at least some fucker found another fucker who is willing to create a new design for the site, so that's off my plate...5 -
So, awesome clip to use for testing... Problem is, I found this in the codebase for a production app.
*Facepalm*1 -
A jr dev was having an issue registering code with our data pipeline (prefect self hosted).
Turns out he's running vscode to launch a anaconda shell (didn't even know that was a thing) to launch jupyter notebook and running commands in the notebook (didn't know that was possible) all from Windows.
No it doesn't work. His environment configuration isn't right. I told him to just run Linux and get rid of all that nonsense.
Nothing is on git yet and were three weeks in! His code is full of hard coded absolute paths of files on his hard drive... He even had an example app to go buy, with a project layout to copy.
There's no helping some people9 -
I'm currently filled with equal parts of "curiosity" and "dread"..
About to go into a meeting arranged by Marketing to discuss the revamp of an old webapp. The terms "fresh new look" and "current day best practices" have been thrown around...
It's a Java 7 webapp deployed to Tomcat 7, with hard coded filesystem paths in JSP files.
Hmm.. maybe a little more "dread" than "curiosity", actually. 🤔5