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

I've learned that trying to jump into a project without properly understanding everything it will entail is bad.

I recently worked on a project that involved modernizing a legacy system and no one on the team (including me) fully understood how the legacy system worked. This led to us missing a lot of edge cases and attacking the project in a way that really wasn't beneficial overall.

If we had thought about the entire system beforehand and mapped out the legacy system, the project would've turned out much better.

Wife discovered MS Paint on her laptop.

She asked me how long the ink would last and how to recharge it when it's finished.

I love her anyway.

Yesterday, somebody disabled the account of a guy who retired 4 years ago. Suddenly, document processing broke.

Turns out his username and password was hardcoded in to a Visual Basic 6 program that's been quietly running in production for over a decade. VB6 reached end of life 10 years ago.

Also the SQL queries work by concatenating user input. 🙃

cmd.CommandText = "SELECT * FROM FOO WHERE BAR=" & userInput

I think I'm gonna have a stroke.

what people think when I say I program in COBOL..

This is just wrong..

True or not? ;)

I started working in 2014. In one of my first jobs they gave me a virtual machine running Windows 2000.

I had a conversation that went more or less this way:

Me: «Why a so old OS?»
Boss: «Because we rely on an old library which has been compiled on Windows 2000»
Me: «What library is it? Who wrote it?»
Boss: «We wrote it. It belongs to our company.»
Me: «Can we try to port it on a more recent OS?»
Boss: «Oh, we've lost the source code a long time ago...»
Me: «...»

Found this 2 years old beauty today:

public boolean hasPermission(User user, Permission permission){
// TODO
return true;
}

The author quit last year.

We need to debug a HUGE legacy code project so...

I’m a senior dev at a small company that does some consulting. This past October, some really heavy personal situation came up and my job suffered for it. I raised the flag and was very open with my boss about it and both him and my team of 3 understood and were pretty cool with me taking on a smaller load of work while I moved on with some stuff in my life. For a week.

    Right after that, I got sent to a client. “One month only, we just want some presence there since it’s such a big client” alright, I guess I can do that. “You’ll be in charge of a team of a few people and help them technically.” Sounds good, I like leading!

    So I get here. Let’s talk technical first: from being in a small but interesting project using Xamarin, I’m now looking at Visual Basic code, using Visual Studio 2010. Windows fucking Forms.

    The project was made by a single dev for this huge company. She did what she could but as the requirements grew this thing became a behemoth of spaghetti code and User Controls. The other two guys working on the project have been here for a few months and they have very basic experience at the job anyways. The woman that worked on the project for 5 years is now leaving because she can’t take it anymore.

    And that’s not the worse of it. It took from October to December for me to get a machine. I literally spent two months reading on my cellphone and just going over my shitty personal situation for 8 hours a day. I complained to everyone I could and nothing really worked.

    Then I got a PC! But wait… no domain user. Queue an extra month in which I could see the Windows 7 (yep) log in screen and nothing else. Then, finally! A domain user! I can log in! Just wait 2 extra weeks for us to give your user access to the subversion rep and you’re good to go!

    While all of this went on, I didn’t get an access card until a week ago. Every day I had to walk to the reception desk, show my ID and request they call my boss so he could grant me access. 5 months of this, both at the start of the day and after lunch. There was one day in particular, between two holidays, in which no one that could grant me access was at the office. I literally stood there until 11am in which I called my company and told them I was going home.

    Now I’ve been actually working for a while, mostly fixing stuff that works like crap and trying to implement functions that should have been finished but aren’t even started. Did I mention this App is in production and being used by the people here? Because it is. Imagine if you will the amount of problems that an application that’s connecting to the production DB can create when it doesn’t even validate if the field should receive numeric values only. Did I mention the DB itself is also a complete mess? Because it is. There’s an “INDEXES” tables in which, I shit you not, the IDs of every other table is stored. There are no Identity fields anywhere, and instead every insert has to go to this INDEXES table, check the last ID of the table we’re working on, then create a new registry in order to give you your new ID. It’s insane.

   

    And, to boot, the new order from above is: We want to split this app in two. You guys will stick with the maintenance of half of it, some other dudes with the other. Still both targeting the same DB and using the same starting point, but each only working on the module that we want them to work in. PostmodernJerk, it’s your job now to prepare the app so that this can work. How? We dunno. Why? Fuck if we care. Kill you? You don’t deserve the swift release of death.

    Also I’m starting to get a bit tired of comments that go  ‘THIS DOESN’T WORK and ‘I DON’T KNOW WHY WE DO THIS BUT IT HELPS and my personal favorite  ‘??????????????????????

Never ever touch legacy code...

Joining an old project

Reading through legacy code, only to discover the comment:

/*
* to the poor guy who has to fix this
* ...
* I'm sorry
*/

I saw this little gem in file explorer. I think M$ needs to update what is considered gigantic!

I got a work on legacy code. The app really depends on a library that was last updated on 2009. The website docs also missing

RIP

Holy fucking hell!
Who the fuck sets up a local network with an 255.255.0.0 subnet mask and then lets the dhcp-server distribute clients onto the 192.249.x.x., 192.2.x.x and the 192.22.x.x networks AT FUCKING RANDOM???
I need to SSH onto 40 routers distributed across the entire campus and have a WORKING internet connection while doing so and you make me spin the connect-disconnect-wheel. Fucking hell dude, don't give me that "Uh, it wasn't intended for this size"-bullshit. You have about 200 active devices. And in one subnet you have space for more than 60 000. Fuck you, dumbass! OH, YOUR FUCKING LIST IS FUCKING WRONG AND YOU DON'T REMEMBER THE IP OF THE ROUTERS? OH FUCK YOU EVEN HARDER!!!
Goddamn people why does legacy maintenance always suck so much?😭😭😭

The groaning sound you hear when someone in your office opens up that legacy code 😅

After opening the legacy code and finding out that the entire shit has 15000+ LOC and without proper comments

Legacy code :)

My teammates are working on a legacy codebase so shitty awful, so poorly written, so full of pitfalls, hidden information and intricate relationships, they gave a name to their development style:

Indiana Jones programming.

Me after changing code of an old project

A story a friend dev of mine told me.
It happened at one of their clients, he was there to fix some internal legacy system of theirs.

Friend: So where are yesterdays logs.
Client: Wait a sec. *goes into server room*
*comes back* Sorry, the logging stopped last week.
Friend: What, let me see.
He walks into the server room and finds this horror:
Their logging system was a dot-matrix printer which was connected to an old win95 pc, which ran a telnet session to the server. From there it copied the output stream to the printer.
The printer ran out of ink(that ribbon) a week ago, leaving a long strip of blank paper coming out of that printer.

-----
I hope to never have to work in such an environment, ever.

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.

Migrating an old system.

"Working with legacy code that hasn't been touched in 2 years is fun!!" said no one ever.

When you have to fix and extend some legacy code and somehow nothing breaks

What legacy Code

#legacycode

Business: How long will it take to add that feature to the legacy system?
Programmer: When will the new system be implemented?
Business: 6 months
Programmer: The new feature will take 7 months

I just got handed a legacy php web project... Full of vulnerabilities... And it's using only mysql_ functions... Not only it's not OOP, there is not even a single class...

How good it's coded: User profiles are created manually by the frontend dev as htmls, and then the past php dev implemented them as links etc in the current page.

This is how I feel:

Horrors of Supporting Legacy Systems

Finally could delete over 10.000 lines of legacy code. Feels so relieving!

Legacy code 😂

They made a full fucking application in MICROSOFT EXCEL!!!!!!!
who the fuck makes an app in Excel? Though it's used internally, it has over 100 users and Everytime there's an update a new file is sent to all of them by mail. They use different excel files as DBs and tables as sheets. It's even got a fucking UI with check boxes and drop-downs and shit

Now guess what my task is?
Understand that entire application from the Excel files and make a webapp to cater to those requirements.

Fuck documentation, there are bugs in the Excel file and I need to fix the bugs in my app

Some good soul please tell me how must one start analyzing an Excel sheet to understand the logic behind it. Or a tool that magically converts "excel applications" to webapps

Refactored a legacy source file and reduced it from 2.8k lines to 300 lines.
Mixed feelings: happy that it is much simpler now and sad that my current project team members never go back to delete unused code.

Testing pending though 😜

I'm 28. When any dev, young or old, finds out that I know how to programme in COBOL, their reaction is one of either shock, sympathy or both. The next question is either "how" or "why".

The answer is the same and it's the reluctance of companies (especially in the US) to upgrade systems because it'll cost more money than maintenance in the short term and the longer they put it off, the more expensive an upgrade is.

It makes my resume stand out, for sure, but not in ways I like. Corporations with legacy systems salivate at my experience because it's uncommon for a young dev and the older ones are retiring. It doesn't matter if my main area of expertise is in mobile development and I'm applying for a job in that field, they immediately want me to consider COBOL.

If you've never had the displeasure of working in COBOL, consider yourself lucky that you work in a job that doesn't require you to maintain a legacy system. It is soul-crushing, absolutely sucks the life out of you, and will haunt you for years until you can safely exclude that company from your work experience.

The worst feeling is writing so many lines of code knowing you could do it in a more concise way if you just had time to think about it but you don't.

Fucking hell, the devs before write a query that pulls 30ish column for a report. When I break it down MANUALLY, since it’s a spaghetti on top of another spaghetti, you only need 6. Fuck you, did you dropped your head when you was a kid? Fuck sake, and every query is written in stored procedure even though you’re using an entity libraries

Today I inserted a single row into a table which triggered four triggers which inserted 5 rows each to different tables triggering 9 triggers inserting 3 rows which triggered more triggers... Nothing about this is ok.

I don't know why my position has to be labeled "developer", when in reality I ain't develop shit, all I do day after day is fixing legacy code

Refactoring legacy code when...

if _out == True:
r = True
elif _out == False:
r = False

return r

That creeping realization how the legacy code works.

The "it's not possible. They couldn't have... yes. Yes they did."

It should have a name

I really feel sad for the person that is going to manage my code in future :(

Poor guy will have nightmare about this

There are 10 types of people in the world:
-Those who understand binary
-Those who don't
-Those who didn't expect a joke in trinary
-Those who keep it going with quaternary
-Those who cohort with quinary
-Those who use senary instead
-Those who think septenary is lucky
-Those who think octonary is prosperous
-And the Windows Naming Committee

See, 10.

if( ... ) {
... several hundreds LOC ...
} else {
... another several hundreds LOC ...
}

...

The upside of having to go through code you wrote years ago (while mumbling WTFs) is that you realize how far you've come in those years.

Just realized I left a console.log in production code at my old job

"Our last lead-developer was a real smart guy, he modernized the legacy code and we all learned a lot from him"

I need a beer, and a shotgun.

Legacy code.

So I once had a job as a C# developer at a company that rewrote its legacy software in .Net after years of running VB3 code - the project had originally started in 1994 and ran on Windows 3.11.

As one of the only two guys in the team that actually knew VB I was eventually put in charge of bug for bug compatibility. Since our software did some financial estimations that were impossible to do without it (because they were not well defined), our clients didn't much care if the results were slightly wrong, as long as they were exactly compatible with the previous version - compatibility proved the results were correct.

This job mostly consisted of finding rounding errors caused by the old VB3 code, but that's not what I'm here to talk about today.

One day, after dealing with many smaller functions, I felt I was ready to finally tackle the most complicated function in our code. This was a beast of a function, called Calc, which was called from everywhere in the code, did a whole bunch of calculations, and returned a single number. It consisted of 500 or so lines of spaghetti.

This function had a very peculiar structure:

Function Calc(...)
...
If SomeVariable Then
...
If Not SomeVariable Then
...
(the most important bit of calculation happened here)
...
End If
...
End If
...
End Function

But for some reason it actually worked. For days I tried to find out what's going on, where the SomeVariable was being changed or how the nesting indentation was actually wrong and didn't match the source, but to no avail. Eventually, though, after many days, I did find the answer.

SomeVariable = 1

Somehow, the makers of VB3 though it would be a good idea for Not X to be calculated as (-1 - X). So if a variable was not a boolean (-1 for True, 0 for False), both X and Not X could be truthy, non-zero values.

And kids these days complain about JavaScript's handling of ==...

Just learned that my previous workplace hired someone to take over the frontend which was my first big javascript project, and now I have an odd fear for my life.

Legacy code.

Honestly though, this is some of the better legacy code I've worked with at this company. It's a nifty alert system wherein you can trigger sending messages to subscribers of that alert via whatever means (phone/email) they've entered.

I'll save you the technical analysis of its internals, but suffice to say it's actually pretty nice, with good separation of concerns, internal logic hidden away, dead-simple public interface, etc. documentation is kinda crap, but it exists (!), so that's a nice change.

but.

For some unknown and bloody bizarre reason, the thing breaks when a user wants both sms AND email notifications. Either by themselves work totally fine, but both together? nonono. Email alerts give ArgumentErrors, so something internal isn't correct, and SMS alerts complain about uninitialized Twilio::Error constants.

but.
they both work fine otherwise?

also, the two notification preferences aren't stored on the same object anywhere. if a user wants both, the user creates two AlertContact objects with different info, and when performed, the Alert basically iterates over these and does its thing for each, so there is no knowledge shared between them. totally should work the same regardless.

idfgi.

ALSO.
AND THIS PART REALLY PISSES ME OFF.

WHEN THERE'S AN ERROR, THIS THING DOESN'T LOG IT. IT STRINGIFIES THE ERROR OBJECT (basically just extracting the message) AND INSERTS THAT INTO THE DATABASE INSTEAD. WHAT THE CRAP.

So, I don't get a stack trace, line number, or anything. just the basic error message. instead of my alert text. because of course that makes sense and totally helps debugging.

aklsjfak;sldfj.
legacy code.

Touching legacy 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?

At least doesn't require obfuscation 😣

RIP all the code I'll be refactoring 🙏😂

Nah, we leave it to the next guy and start making more babies.

Leaving a legacy...

Preface: My company took over another company. A week ago I inherited their IT.

"IT" !!!! Are you fucking kidding me?!

Their server stood at an ex employees homeoffice. So I drove to her and she had 0 idea about IT. Server was just "Running". I tore that fuck down and saw an aweful lot of Hentai in all home folders.

WTF?!

Not enough, their crm was a makroinfested access table. Shit was protected so I couldn't even edit the makros. The retarded fucktards hardcoded paths to serverside folder \\fuck\you\hard\cavetroll

Just so that server will never see the light of my domain! Damn you? Mothership of sisterfucking dickgirls!

Another non programming related rant although kinda tech related.
So I work in a distribution center and today I learned box packing.

1. THEIR LEGACY ASS SYSTEM ONLY RUNS ON IE (FUCK ME IN THE ASS SIDEWAYS PLEASE).
2. SYSTEM CONSTANTLY FREEZES.
3. THE HAND SCANNERS RUN ON AN OLD FUCKING LEGACY WINDOWS (PRE 2000 I THINK) SYSTEM AND IS SLOW AS MOTHERFUCKING HELL.

Yes, it is VERY frustrating to have to work with this FUCKING SHIT THE WHOLE MOTHERFUCKING DAY.

Plus side today, the locations I had to pick from today included 200, 403 and 404. Had loads of inside jokes about not being able to find locations and not having permission etc 😆

I will fix that in the next iteration.

Just come across this little gem on an 8 year old website :(

Found this gem in some old piece of code:

public static void printStackTrace(Exception e){
e.printStackTrace();
}

Fuck debugging 20 years old code in fucking assembly !!

When a colleague shows you he's using the "latest" JavaScript framework, but you're still stuck with the "old" stuff..

Yeah, so that ‘quick fix’ to the legacy code actually broke everything and I’m not sure why. Ciao!

Legacy 1000+ line method

While trying to learn a legacy codebase, I realize one library supports almost everything. I decide to look it up.

Last updated: 1996

When i read this, I think "Inject me please! Inject me with all you got!"

For when I'm debugging some ancient scripture

"Fix this legacy code"

When this becomes your bible...

VB3.

In my last rant I mentioned I used to convert VB3 code to .Net. Before that, I used to work on the VB3 product itself. This software emulated something from the real world, and as such complied with a bunch of regulations that changed on a regular basis, and always had additions and removals that were to be done on a strict schedule (e.g. "we're adding a new product next month, so we have to be able to sell it by the first of the month"). As such, it was a huge sprawling mess.

One day, I was given a task to change some feature slightly. The task was simple enough and really only required adding one line of code. I added that line and clicked "Run".

Error: Too Much Code

What? What do you mean too much code? I asked a colleague for help. "Oh, don't worry, it happens when a function is too long. Just remove one or two of the comments and try again." The comments were, naturally, old deleted code that was quite meaningless so I had no qualms about removing some. It worked, and I went on with my life.

This started happening on a regular basis on our larger functions. But there were always comments to remove so it wasn't a big issue.

One day, though, it happened on a five-line function. This was puzzling - the error had always happened when a function was too big but this one clearly wasn't. What could the error mean? I went to the same colleague.

Apparently, there's also a limit to how big the entire code base can be. "Just find a function that isn't used any more and delete it." And so I did. There were many such functions, responsible for calculating things which no longer existed so they were never called. For months, I'd find functions and remove them. Until there weren't any more. I checked every function and subroutine in our codebase, and they were all used; I checked every possible code path and they were all needed.

What do I do now, I asked? The colleague, who was an expert on VB3 but worked on another project, came and take a look.

"Look at all these small functions you made! No wonder you're running out of space!" Apparently each function created a lot of overhead in the compiled executable. The solution was clear. Combine small functions into large monolithic ones, possibly passing flags in them to do completely unrelated things. Oh, and don't comment on the different parts because we have no room for comments in our code base.

Ah, the good old days.

Me trying to debug CSS compiled from a legacy SCSS-project containing 100+ files and no source maps.

With luck like this I'll be buying a lottery ticket next.

Bad coders bad coders what you gonna do what you gonna do when I come to you

- Crash

Sooo I've been working on an ancient php 5.6 project that did not have any documentation and was a homemade "framework" created 7 years ago. The original creator is long gone and no one else knows a lot about this project.

When I first looked into it I almost immediately noticed the security flaws...

Old outdated libraries
a "development" feature to easily turn dev mode on/off
BY A GET PARAMETER!

it spits out full sql queries and php warnings -.-

Oh and did I mention that the site is a webshop.... and has a backdoor password?
AND THAT THE CUSTOMER REQUESTED THAT?

Today I started work on a new project that contains a lot of legacy. I asked the developers about unit testing javascript and was told that not only is there none in place, but it's not worth adding any in.

At first, I grimaced and thought fair enough. This is their codebase, it's their choice. I've now been thinking about this for a few hours and have instead decided that screw those guys, I'm adding in a testing framework, a module pattern that's compatible with the existing code, and unit testing the crap out of it. If they don't want it they can refactoring it out, but I can't bring myself to intentionally deliver code I know is crap.

I WILL FORCE CODE QUALITY ON THEM.

unix legacy

You know what's worse than fixing websites in IE?

Fixing websites in safari for winblows.

FUCKING HORSESHIT

Digging through legacy code

Anyone else work in a codebase that is so deeply convoluted, that the only way to make new features work is to write new code in a similarly convoluted way?

Everyone wants to refactor our system, but we're a small shop with an insane amount of technical debt, so it likely won't happen for a long time. Any suggestions in the meantime? I feel like I'm spending more time figuring out how to make something work in our system then learning actual good practices.

I kinda miss this era.

- Image proudly ripped from trogus old rant.

Fun drinking game: work on a legacy system for a few hours. Every time you say "what the fuck?" equals 1 shot.

There’s nothing like opening a legacy system you didn’t build and has for some reason lasted the turn of the century, only to add a new feature without breaking anything.....

Would have been nice if I had written that JS function before saving the other file 🙄

There’s nothing like building in production 💩

Everytime I'm digging into some random legacy code where no one knows its original intention I'm seeing "Software Archeologist" as a well-paid job sooner or later...
Fucking undocumented legacy code...

That feeling when the business wants you to allow massive chunks of data to simply be missing or not required for "grandfathered" accounts, but required for all new accounts.

Our company handles tens of thousands of accounts and at some point in the past during a major upgrade, it was decided that everyone prior to the upgrade just didn't need to fill in the new data.

Now we are doing another major upgrade that is somewhat near completion and we are only just now being told that we have to magically allow a large set of our accounts to NOT require all of this new required data. The circumstances are clear as mud. If the user changes something in their grandfathered account or adds something new, from that point on that piece of data is now required.
But everything else that isn't changed or added can still be blank...
But every new account has to have all the data required...

WHY?!

Most of our university courses are stuck in the early 2000. Feels like it's mostly due to lazy professors who just use the same material year after year.

What do you think?

It feels like I'm not learning anything useful anymore. Should get out of here ASAP.

[...] great! Nice to hear from you that you've got experience using C#! Our shipping company will also need a mobile interface for our IBM AS400 relic older-than-the-pyramids server, can you do that?

Me (a little displeased about the idea of working on a pre-existing legacy server): yes sure, I'm working on a Android project right now, so I'm learning a lot about it lately, I think it's totally feasible

Them: oh, but we are using a windows mobile device

Me (wondering why they are still using Windows phone): I can look it up and let you know btw

> Windows Mobile /= Windows Phone
> Deprecated since 2010

I'm fucked.

Legacy code 😂

WTF? This scares the crap out of me.

Legacy code

How I feel about legacy software.

"I'll refactor this quick hack later..."

At an auto parts store and was taking a look at the UI.

I FOUND A DINOSAUR!

More realistically I saw F20 as a shortcut key. How I know it wasn’t a typo? There was also F16. Wow. Even their keyboard stop at F12.

Talk about legacy program.

I really, really, fucking god damn it REALLY need to move a legacy project from the grave yard server and get it in git, and then build a dev environment for it, so I can stop making incredibly volatile changes direct to PROD (backend, frontend and DB all at once and then test it while it’s live and being used, but fuck me if I can be bothered digging through a 10GB code base and attempting to make it work in a multi-environment setup when it’s going to be a long trip down the error logs until it works again 😱🔫

Man I felt like a detective today.

A website that has been running for a few years without problem failed today when looking for data of August 2017.

The code was written by people long ago that I have never met (I've been here for 3 months) was horrendous. Looking through an ArrayList of dates for 15 countries and pushing them into a dictionary before finally turning the data into a visual grid of countries that uploaded data. I think can squash this into a single loop and do them side by side. The function that got a single date would open and close an SQL connection 30 X 15 times in a row. God fucking damn. You can open the connection one fucking time if you can write a proper query, how did that spaghetti code get through? I'll never know.

Anyway.. after looping painfully through it I found a rogue Hungarian key failing to be used in the dictionary. This "given key not found" led me to believe that some wrong data in the database.

After finding the SQL responsible in the code, I threw in the right parameters and BAM. Some dolt has allowed data from ANY country to go into each uploader, they didn't sanitise their inputs. This has been operating for years without problem so I have to assume people just.. didn't try uploading lots of data into the wrong country.

I found the author of the file, it gave me their PC ID. Due to the nature of my role I have access to the database that allows me identify people using them. So I found out there was a Hungarian fellow that had originally called the file "teszt xxx" so it was obviously on purpose. Wonder if it's because he knew of the problem (very doubtful, his role has nothing to do with programming) so I'm a tad confused as to why they did that..

Well, will get answers eventually as my senior decided to send out an email with some managers names being cc'd. I assume he wasn't happy because it took a bit of my time and I'm nearing the end of a big project.

I don't know if I'd call this a rant, but it did piss me off trying to understand foreign code so let's leave it as such.

Just as I type this, we have received an email back with the woman raising the issue claiming to not know who or why this man did so.

A mystery :D

Dealing with legacy code is one of the hardest thing I've done in my life

First rant (well, first on devRant anyway)! So, I'm working on a project to refactor a decade old codebase so that all references to ip addresses are in config. It sucks. But I did find an ascii art fish in an old cron script, so that's something.

There I was, foolishly thinking that I had escaped legacy land for good.
Today I ventured deep into its realms again to solve a bug in our old system. It's a maze, with tons of branches, frontend and backend code entangled in each other (think: echoing a call to a JS function from the PHP controller, and much much more), and classes with functions that often span 500+ lines.
I have lost my way and just lit a campfire. Hopefully I will find my way out by daylight.

Coz why not

Overwhelmed by a shitty codebase? Use the boy scout rule and leave the code you're editing a little better than you found it.

Worked wonders for me when I realized I could spend literal months refactoring and desperately needed a systematic approach.

Little by little that rotting house of cards will turn into something okay. It's a nice feeling looking back after a couple of months and see what you've done to make things better.

Also, make sure to remember the cost of wrestling with hurried legacy solutions in your estimates as well. Just adjust the level of bluntness depending on your work environment: admitting that things can/need to be improved can be unpleasant for some to hear even though it's true.

Legacy code written under the pressure oft a deadline by people not knowing the capabilities of the framework they use.

I am doomed...

So I setup a nice csv file for the customer to fill in the shop items for their webshop, you know? with a nice layout like
name - language - description etc.

(just temporary, because the legacy website is going under a ((sadly frontend only)) rework, so it now also has to display different 'kind' of products... and because the new cms isn't done yet they
have to provide the data with other means)

my thoughts were to create a little import script to write the file into the database.... keep in mind of the relations... etc...

guess what? TWO MONTHS later, I get a file with a custom layout, empty cells, sometimes with actual data, sometimes (in red / green text color) notes for me

I mean WHY.... WHY DO YOU MAKE MY LIVE HARDER???

So now I have to put data in 6 columns and 411 rows in the database BY HAND...

oh and did I mention they also have relations? yeah... I also have to do that by hand now...

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

Love those moments when you’re refactoring legacy code and manage to put logic of 50 loc with bunch of loops and conditions into single sql query.

I've pulled the third all-nighter in a row because of a ridiculous bug in legacy spaghetti..

I finally kicked its ass so I can now emerge from my cave, feeling like both a lifeless zombie and someone who got reanimated after half a week.

You all helped me through this tough time, love you all devRant ♥

I hate hearing "this should be a quick one" from the client. Especially when your code base is a fucking legacy with no documentations, no testing, and a multisite that shares the same classes where functions has some crazy if conditions just to satisfy each site's requirements.

Trying to add features to 15 year-old legacy code..

Big legacy code files in COBOL.

My team at my company is mostly done with a process converting all COBOL to Java or PL/SQL but there are still some major processes that remain. This includes a 60,000 line process that is at the heart of it. When something goes wrong there it's so hard to find :c

I'm a contractor at a product company and today I had the pleasure of working with some jQuery.

A function needed to be called before another function, hard work right?

So I moved the call to the function 3 rows higher, checked it in, set the task as ready for test and started to look for other tasks.
Within a couple of minutes I get a direct message from another dev, let's call him Steve.
Steve wanted me to set the task to ready for code review instead of test, so I did just that and tried to move on.

Some minute or two later Steve contacts me again:
"It would be great if you'd move the comment so it'd be over the call to the function"

Well, I'm not one of those who likes comments... If you need a comment, it's probably not good/readable code. In some cases sure, it might be a complex block coming up.
Sorry, lost my train of thought.

I answered Steve : "Are you sure, I could just remove it instead?"

(for readability S will be Steve and M will be me)

S: Well, it's always good to have comments
M: In this case I think it will be alright.
S: But it's nice to see what the function is doing.
M: I'll do it if you really want me to.
S: It's better to have the comment than to not have it and needing it.
M: Okay then

The name of the function : LoadOrganizationTree()

And this is the comment :
//Load organization tree

That fealing when someone that picked from the graves an old project that you've started when you were just a noob developer... and then you look at the code... and then the shame.

Rant
I'm a CS student at a university in the global top 10. We currently have two courses using Java, where we have to submit our work to a judge program. One of them is running Java 7. the second one Java 6! Come on, what year is it? Just update your fucking software and the assignments, you lazy fucks!

First rant. Am I doing this right?

===Development Crisis===
(~˘▾˘)~ Lazy Mode: On

a) Rewrite 100 lines of complex code to over 300 lines to hopefully solve issue.

OR

b) Use depreciated legacy module to solve problem instantly.

Decisions, decisions....

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The feeling when you realize some people on the project are writing legacy code from scratch. Apparently it seems they've never heard of any coding standards, they think clean code and style guidelines are for the weak and single responsibility means one single method is responsible for a bunch of unbelievably diverse things. They are like the Gumbys of the dev realm but it's my brain that hurts every time I have to deal with their code.

In my short career, I've seen projects become legacy before their first release. Hell, I've seen proof-of-concept apps turn into technical debt because to management as long as it works we won't rewrite it.

Damn I'm pretty hard hitting my limits here

My company asked me if I would like to work some extra hours because otherwise they don't make all the deadlines

But damnit asking 10+ hours a day from a junior web developer is quite a lot

😒 Especially if it's an old legacy project where I have to work on...

He was brave enough to out his name on this... Legacy code, always full of surprises.

When ActiveX is proposed as a solution for a staff facing web application, but all the staff run Windows 10 and use Edge or Chrome...

Imagine updating a legacy web app and the code is so bad it physically makes you sick every time you look at it. Tables with over 400 columns, . And don't even get me started on the security issues. Apparently writing "Confidential" on the top of the page is enough security. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. People should get licenced before being allowed to code.

I just found a 980 line long method in one of our legacy code bases.... And I need to add to it. There are no unit tests and I desperately want to refactor that shit....

Legacy code again.... found this... losing faith...

My last company had a code base originating in the 90's and they still write most parts of the GUI with a library that is a thin layer on top of Win32 API, with a self-rolled "ORM" for DB access (with LOTS of enums) and all that with >2million lines of C++ code. The code includes at least two implementations of std vector and std:list. One of which is even *named* std::vector. Feels good remembering that I have left that behind

Have you ever been at at that magical point where you have to decide if it's worth putting the effort in to understand the legacy code, or just delete it all and start again?

Can someone explain me why someone would even do that?

I mean, either she was paid for lines of code or she’s just dumb as fuck.

Going through legacy or other developers code which don't have documentation or even comments. Plus the author of the code is not working in same organisation anymore to consult. We have to understand the code like deciphering any ancient language. 😥

Legacy code is like overgrown bangs 😋 It's very hard to decide if you have to let it grow out or trim it.

Tinkered about with css grid today, now I hate legacy browsers even more for keeping it from me.

Goddammit.

Holy Mother of casts.
Just stumbled across a line that started with (((((( because it has so many casts in it...
That's why you don't use instanceof kids.

Who has the craziest (not largest per se) Production stack?

I just found out we have tomcat webapps, calling Angular, which is calling Java to call a Perl script.

why on Earth do I find PHP error notices in the _JS_ console when debugging this old project... and those notices are even stopping the code from working. seriously, PHP, why??

Been asked if we can make a few "minor tweaks" to a Visual Basic 6.0 application last worked on in 2013.

I haven't coded in Visual Basic in approximately 20 years, the project can't be opened in Visual Studio 2012 or above and the code I've seen is a dumpster fire.

Please send help.

I am both happy and sad looking at the code I wrote some time back. It makes me realize how much I have learned and at the same time how stupid I was.

When you're the only one in the office that codes in C++ and you get this email -- legacy project code here we come.

Every time I read a team member's code I feel like I get immediately closer to them. Like all of a sudden I see how they think a little more clearly.

My first contractor company 3 years ago, I was only junior with 3 other senior devs. I was assigned a project implemented by other company. So I am reading code and it’s total mess and then I find comment in controller that says “// some magic here, don’t touch it”, turns out that piece of code was added by our lead developer.

Spaghetti code be like

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

if function() == !!!false

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

Just got an internship in a big company. Related to web development but they want me to use/maintain legacy jsp, servlet code. Should I take it? There are other departments too but I have been put in this shitty one.

As the ones who read my previous rants know, I work with legacy code a lot and I regularly have ' how the fuck did this ever work??' moments. So I decided in order to deal with all the crap I encounter, I will make a hall of fame / shame of bad code as my own side project. Does anyone have an idea for a good name?

var _self = Object.create(Rant);

Hello devs I'm back

A few months ago I joined a software development company and I was pretty specific that I wasn't going to do support or maintenance only feature development, well, this past 3 months I've been doing dev helping stablish good practices and a better architecture for the app, but guess who is joining a support team tomorrow, they sold me the idea of a refactor team, I was trilled and accepted, now they tell me it's a legacy bug fixing team, damn I hate this crap, hope y'all doing better

So, a close relative of me is a local politician in my hometown.
I managed his political website for a while but then I completely left it in the hand to who deal whit is PR.

Today he emailed me to update only the header photo. No big deal.

After a bit of scrambling I find what I used when I made that.

FML I hate me of the past

Legacy tech be like:

"The connection to this site uses TLS 1.0 (an obsolete protocol), RSA (an obsolete key exchange), and AES_128_CBC with HMAC-SHA1 (an obsolete cipher)."

Joined a fantastic small software company. I love the team. Office is beautiful. Benefits are stellar. Commute is very short.

Codebase is legacy. 15+ years old. No unit tests. Files of 10-15k lines, no comments/useless comments. Inconstistent file locations/structure patterns. unclear/not useful variable names. Not using Git.

I need tools and strategies to thrive and do well. I know Martin Fowler has a book on refactoring legacy code. I'd also appreciate any mindsets you all have for thinking about working with legacy codebases.

When the manager tells me its a simple project and its actually legacy code

Some weird web system written in Perl running on an AIX server. No one knew how it works and the clients was experiencing issues. Off course there was not any documentation.

Actually the problem wasn't solved, a new system was made months later.

So I'm having to upgrade yet another fucking legacy python codebase (I seem to have garnered a reputation for this now) and I'm having to manually download, configure and install fucking everything because I need such ridiculous versions of stuff that I can't just download and install.

Is this normal? Is this what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life?

One thing that really bothers me is that people use use megabyte to mean mebibyte. What makes it even worse is that Windows does it too. It says it shows gigabyte but actually shows gibibyte.

Now imagined my frustration when I saw this D:

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. 😐

So I am managing some legacy code and I found quite the gem last week.
The code went something like this :
IF(methodA()&&methodB())

However, methodB returned ! methodA...

Today, i discovered thus beauty within our legacy code:

// TODO: this is probably the most dirty thing in our product. It needs a model more than anything else

This captions a crappy part of controller code for several years :/

Started to write a blues song about this depressing legacy code base, but then it turned into an emo song, and now it's very heavy metal.

If you think your legacy code is bad - this is what I came across in a system I'm refactoring this morning... and this isn't even the bug I was looking for.

I work in a large organization that previously didn't have it's own development team. Therefore various business areas have built their own solutions to solve problems which mostly involve Access and Excel.

Many of these applications still exist and we are expected to resolve any issues with them and update them when necessary performing this support role while still expected to meet our (very tight) development timelines.

I can't tell you how much of a pain in the tits it is to be trying to power through a priority development only to be interrupted with an urgent instruction to fix a 17 year old Access database that's running slow.

Of course it's pissing running slow, it's 17 years old, has nearly a million records and you have multiple users accessing it across the country!! I think it's time to peacefully let it die.

Do you ever just get the feeling you're actively writing legacy code...

One month ago I started rewriting some old spaghetti application (not even legacy because it’s not that old) from scratch.

Must admit that I kind of regret that decision. I just could take my time to learn that damn yii2 (that I really don’t like) and refactor all shit there, optimize queries and I would have been finished it by now already.

I am rewriting it in symfony, have everything designed quite well it just time consuming to implement, need to finish it till February and I am drained as fuck.

Even worse part is that I will be switching job soon, and my current company are looking for new developer to change me and of course they interviewing only juniors, who will have no one to guide them and ensure that code they write is good. So it seems quite pointless rewriting it, because after leaving someone will fuckup that codebase anyway.

But yeah, I guess that’s something you only learn in practice, so reminder for my future self (and tip for others): don’t rewrite it - refactor it instead and don’t allow your feelings interfere with your critical decisions.

Anyone who willingly uses Python 2 and doesn't try to convert it to Python 3 will be shot on site.

Day 3 of trying to set up a VM for this legacy app. Demotivation is at an all-time high.

That member of staff* that decided to write a batch script with calls to SVN, and named it svn.bat

*me

I have been working with legacy code the last past two weeks. Please someone to kill me.

Today I stumbled across one the worst UX's for a filter I have ever seen, and yes it was a legacy system.

So there is a screen to show a data grid of all orders in the system with accompanying filters; date, status, free text etc.
And there is also a drop-down that allows users to filter by order number, but the genius that made it figured the best way to allow users to search for an order was to render all possible order numbers inside a single drop-down :| and they are not even ordered!

I think I may have officially gotten myself fired before I even started a new job. My salaried start date was supposed to be Jan 3 but they hired me to do spot work at my hourly rate until then. My server side PHP skills were never great but they appear to be completely inadequate to the task of patching their undocumented, spaghetti legacy code. I just sent a note basically saying I either need to convert their entire site to something else 3 weeks ahead of the timeframe we planned or to basically outsource my work to another developer to patch this code. Feeling like a total imposter at the moment. I wouldn't hire me.

Ugggh. Has anyone else on here worked with MFC?

I've been updating some legacy software and it's been like wading through a swap that was caused by a malfunctioning trailer park septic system: no map, and mostly shit with the occasional nasty surprise.

When you like your framework but had enough of the legacy project's recoding in it for the week

Oh boy. 2.5k loc of legacy bash code. The task is to give every function its own script since that is literally what this script is. Cha8ned together individual scripts . Fingers crossed its actually just breaking out functions :x

So, if you were supposed to work on a website that is already pretty shitty coded, shitty styled and outdated... Would you go on coding like shit for the sake of consistency or would you embed a new mini-system in it trying to pay some fucking respect to everything you have learned?
Edit: in this scenario, you can actually make a choice haha

I have 9 voicemails on my work phone. We have to change our six+ digit PIN every month, so I'm just going to not check my voicemails.

Well, I just finished up moving a website from 2009 to a new server. The website is so old that it still used PHP short tags which took forever to fix, as it's a big website, and then I had to update all kinds of weird SQL queries. Of course, no documentation was available and the guy who made it doesn't work for my company anymore.

You want to know what's even worse? The website was made in 2009 with pure PHP code. After that they switched to Yii with phpBB for their forum. Two years ago they switched to WordPress, but still use some parts of the old system for management. Just imagine the clusterfuck of files and logic that exists within this website.

#Fun

Oh, god...why? (my reaction reading my code from 5 years ago, when I got my first programming job)

I still work there and I love it. I learned a lot in these years...

It is fascinating to see how my motivation and productivity decreases while working on legacy code.

When refactoring legacy code and your colleague committed this a week ago... As punishment we made him listen to "You're too fat to fly" all day long.

Lots of legacy code.

Working for one of our oldest customer, in some serious old, ugly and outdated code(web service).
The dev db doesn't contain any relevant data.
The QA service points to production, so can't use it for any tests.
My contact, at the customer, is going on vacation tomorrow.
Their pm is going on vacation next Friday.
No time for refactoring, db data updates or otherwise do important and much needed updates.
They want it to be done yesterday.

FML.

We've got a big legacy app which we have to rewrite. The current client applications are only working on XP(!). We have to move the clients to the browser so we can finally get rid of all XP vm-s. The db schema is complex but still 1000+ stored procedures and functions and about a hundred tables with 13 years of data.
So I ask the guy responsible for maintaining the DB code. (he is ~25 years older than me)

me - Where is the source of the database. Which project?
he - Where would it be? It's in the db.
me - So we've got a huge db without VCS, upgrade/downgrade scripts, etc?
he - Yes. I don't get why young developers always want to use shiny new tech like git just because it is cool. It has nothing that an external usb backup drive can't do.
me - VCS has been around since the early 1980's...
he - If you really want, you can put it under git or whatever, so you can sleep better, but I still think it is stupid and a waste of time.

I get that it's hard to keep up, but getting personal...

When your colleagues are doing legacy code refactoring but you know that's not gonna end well 😂

I know that if something looks stupid but it works, it ain't stupid... but this is just plain borderline.

Basically, a cast from int to String to int to String from some legacy code I'm working with

Working on a big project with lots of legacy code and terrible code. Full of jewels like this:

$('.form-item-to input').parent().removeClass('isOpen');

Man... .form-item-to IS the immediate, direct and only parent of the only input child!!!

SOAP. Was integrating a service provided by a telecom and it was written in SOAP. No easy RESt but fucking SOAP.

Lets make sure that we are always using the latest software! Keep things up to date#
..... (new version of bulma.io comes out)
..... (Updating libraries...)
.....
Why is the website all fucked up looking?
Shit they changed the padding level on like everything?!
..... Reverting back to older version, fuck that idea.

I just found a running and used NNTP server.
Google it young ones...