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When your boss asks you to debug some crappy legacy code and you need to bring in the heavy artillery
7 -
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.10 -
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: «...»10 -
Found this 2 years old beauty today:
public boolean hasPermission(User user, Permission permission){
// TODO
return true;
}
The author quit last year.7 -
Yes, that's an 18 arguments constructor.. there's 21 other classes and I'm afraid of looking into them.
52 -
Immortalised this actual legacy code for our Senior Devs leaving present (we all inherited this) with his last task being to refactor it, may he never have to work with code like this again.
14 -
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 ‘??????????????????????14 -
"Remember that script you made a few years ago? How did you make it work with product x?"
Dude, I can barely remember how I brewed coffee this morning.7 -
Reading through legacy code, only to discover the comment:
/*
* to the poor guy who has to fix this
* ...
* I'm sorry
*/3 -
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
RIP23 -
After opening the legacy code and finding out that the entire shit has 15000+ LOC and without proper comments
3 -
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.6 -
Who needs Legacy Code to f*ck up your day when you can't understand the code you wrote 2 weeks ago3
-
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.
15 -
Just found this precious gem in the legacy code I am maintaining! How do you check if a string is empty :-D ?
6 -
I'm your CEO
This is our monolithic full stack JavaScript Saas
This is our legacy code
And Welcome to jackass.1 -
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 months3 -
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:
6 -
Why the fuck would you assign two new values to the same variable in consecutive lines like that ? I swear this project is driving me nuts. Fuck the dev who wrote this.
7 -
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 😜7 -
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.1
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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 libraries19
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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.6
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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 code7
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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 name3 -
Debugging vb code written by someone else, on a lagging remote desktop connection
I guess this is the peak of legacy code9 -
Oh, we don't know why it broke. I know you just did A HUGE FUCKING DATABASE SEVER UPGRADE to the server we're connected to, but no one understands this code, so can't update it to work. Can you roll back 3 VERSIONS so our application that hasn't had a code change in 11 years is optimized?2
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I'm currently rewriting the heart, foundation, core module of my company, that's written with my own shitty legacy code that is old, is dirty, but somehow worked flawlessy during whole 4 years. I'm afraid.4
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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, 10.7 -
"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.
10 -
When you realize the legacy PHP code you're working in has a class you're extending with over 2000 lines and you think, "Nope, this isn't a class, it's a university."2
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Once i found a legacy code where the old dev avoided the execution of some lines by wrapping them with a
if (1 == 0) {...}6 -
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.6 -
Me at QA, talking about a nasty bug I found in legacy code.
QA: what was the root cause?
Me: pos code.
QA: pos?!
Me: piece o' shit.
QA: ...1 -
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?5 -
That moment when you resign from a place filled with politics and legacy code and unqualified people ...
feeling peaceful4 -
Today at work while reading legacy code:
do {
...
} while(false)
Wanna cry and laugh at the same time23 -
When the last dev wrote code and you dared to read it....switch on a Boolean, what even is your life legacy dev?
2 -
ever got a task to modify legacy code and when you looked at it you were like... burning it with fire is the only way!
1 -
Let an expert consultant write your code, they say. It will be all right, they say.
Found this today in a legacy codebase.
2 -
Found this gem in some old piece of code:
public static void printStackTrace(Exception e){
e.printStackTrace();
}3 -
Found a "great" variable name while maintaining legacy code:
{
...
Report goodbye = Report::first($id);
goodbye->delete();
...
}
Goodbye report! 😂😂😂 -
I've taken over a project with legacy code, this is one of the methods:
private bool areEqual(string value1, string value2)
{
return value1 == value2;
}
Also, the opening brackets are on a new line10 -
While trying to learn a legacy codebase, I realize one library supports almost everything. I decide to look it up.
Last updated: 19962 -
:/
Project i got to work couldn't get worse
1)Legacy code
2)mathematical model based emulation
3)no proper comments
4)deadline approaching4 -
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?3 -
Worked on a shit ton of poorly maintained legacy code today. Had to setup an entire intervention to deal with it...
5 -
My worst "legacy code" experience was when the company I work at couldn't get their heads out of their asses and stubbornly continued to write legacy code. As of this day they are still doing everything according to what was hip around 2004. And they even force me to write new legacy code.
New legacy code: it sounds like a paradox, but this company makes it happen.7 -
Fun drinking game: work on a legacy system for a few hours. Every time you say "what the fuck?" equals 1 shot.5
-
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...1 -
i once ran into this:
// magic part starts here, do not touch
and this:
// i know, and i'm sorry
in legacy code. needless to say, i prefer undocumented, well-written code to all that followed1 -
After finishing a long and arduous refactoring I got to delete some hundreds of lines of really horrible, unmaintainable and broken legacy code. Feels absolutely great.
I love the smell of deleted code in the morning. -
When I get myself a coffee in the morning, opening up my IDE, looking at the legacy code.. my brain starts yelling: "out of the way coffee, this is a job for whiskey"2
-
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 :D6 -
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.9
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My worst devExperience since there are dev evperiences for me, was when I had to rewrite a pretty important tool to the new onlineshop we created.
See https://devrant.com/rants/1016596/...
My best devExperience in 2017 was going live with one of our biggest web projects I had to develop all alone and hearing only great feedback. My boss told me there were more than 30'000 visitors one day after going live.
It was and still is quite satisfying. 😎1 -
Dat moment when, after some hard work, you can finally delete that abomination your predecessor left you as a present...
-
Worst legacy experience is when you go back to a project you were working on when you first started learning. My own code disgusts me the most.2
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Legacy code written under the pressure oft a deadline by people not knowing the capabilities of the framework they use.
I am doomed...2 -
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.6 -
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 ♥ -
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.3
-
Today is my birthday and my company as a present will make me work on disgusting legacy code, stored procedures, impossible to debug and convoluted as fuck.
And everything needs to be released yesterday...
Happy birthday motherfucker.1 -
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 :c10 -
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...8 -
===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)_/¯2 -
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.4
-
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.2
-
That moment when code reuse makes you reuse reused code and you actually reuse a BUG.
You decide to go for code reusing when your boss asks: "Can you add an edit popup besides that 'add customer' popup button?". You do some little tweaks to the "new customer" code and it allows that to save over an existing entry, cool.
However, after a lot of time spent on reviewing the resulting PR, turns out there was a dormant bug on the code you reused, and it woke up with its new use.
That code was a bad copy-pasta from another, bigger form, which included a whole bunch of optional fields. As it was only used to save new entries, those now missing fields were simply being saved as empty. But as you reused that to save existing entries, you were now cleaning up all those optional fields without noticing.1 -
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....4
-
Looking at some legacy code and I was like wtf, later read the author name and it was me.
How people were tolerating me than! Man😂 -
The ability to look at uncommented legacy code and read the thoughts of the developer when he wrote it
(seriously, comment your shit!) -
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.3
-
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. 😥2
-
Legacy code is like overgrown bangs 😋 It's very hard to decide if you have to let it grow out or trim it.8
-
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.
9 -
Everyday is my worst legacy code experience...... I go into work, open up anything written less than a year ago, and another part of me dies.
-
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 behind2
-
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?2
-
Finding comments in legacy code like "too tired, fuck you" or "this implementation is dirtyyyyyy" makes me wanna punch a dev.5
-
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.
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When the legacy code has a misspelled CSS class selector but it'd break more than it'd fix... And forced to use the mispelled word. Omfg people.1
-
When you're the only one in the office that codes in C++ and you get this email -- legacy project code here we come.
1 -
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.
-
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.5 -
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.1
-
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??6
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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?3
-
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.3 -
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.2 -
One day, I have debugged some nasty legacy code and all of the sudden I wonder...
If Jesus walked on the water, can he swim on land?8 -
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.4
-
So, a spaghetti legacy code, written by some dude that obviously hates his job, needs update and we argue about spaces vs tabs....4
-
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.
1 -
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.2 -
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...3 -
Tinder for devs: match people based on their coding style. Tabs go with tabs, spaces with spaces and uncommented code goes with legacy code.1
-
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 :/ -
Gotta love those moments when you expand your code and the legacy part magically works just fine. Congrats, past me, for writing a stable core.1
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Needing to teach myself M$ InfoPath because of legacy business code. What better way to learn than getting the feet a little wet first!
-
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. -
My second worst experience with legacy code:
JSP with inline java to create JavaScript which creates HTML on every fucking page load.
Luckily I leave that company too.5 -
!rant
Is anyone familiar with source trail?
https://www.sourcetrail.com/
Wanted to get some info before I drop it into a legacy code base 🤭1 -
I am usually lurking in here since I never really worked as a Software Developer, but until I start going to the University, I thought I might also find myself a job in Software Development.
Well... I don't know where to start.
Someone in here heard of JBoss? Me neither... we're using it... It is a Framework to deploy fortified Java Web Applications. My first day was very chaotic and was dedicated to get this fucking shit to work. I got JBoss 7.5 from my colleagues and started deploying the hello world program...
So. Many. Things. Gone. Wrong...
After like 5 hours of troubleshooting, I had to install/setup a new wrapper with my own batch scripts, install SPECIFICALLY jdk 1.7_17 (anything else won't work) and downgrade JBoss to 7.2.
Yeah that's the first thing. Let's continue about JBoss. Version 7.2 uh? What's the newest one though? Oh it's now known as WildFly... huh... FUCKING HELL, THE NEWEST ONE IS VERSION 10.1??? AND EVEN 10.1 IS 1 YEAR OLD? WHAT THE FUCKING FUCKK AAAAAAHH...
So yeah, after that, without any expectation, I had a look at our codebase. Unit tests huh? I couldn't find a single self written one to test the applications functions... I asked my fellow devs and they told me that "it is too time consuming and we have to focus on new features, the QM Team will just manually test the application". Ever heard this bullshit? A big fat ass codebase with shittons of customers and not a single unit test...
So last but not least, since it is a web application, it also got a site. Y'know RichFaces? The deprecated front end library for Java Webpages? Where you got like 150 Tables per page everyone with a random id everytime you reload? Yeah I don't think I have to explain that to you guys...
So now YOU tell me? Is this a place to be 😂😂😂6 -
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... -
Today I was forced to write spaghetti code.
When your database structure isn't set up properly, that happens...
I'm already sure I will need to revisit this piece of literal shit when we revise that structure. Though, it'll be much easier and logical, and I'll probably be able to just delete a big part of the code and implement it as intended. -
"Refractor this method to reduce its Cognitive Complexity from 110 to 15 allowed."
*Pan*
Ok let's do it :
label : for(....) {
if(...){
for(.....){
If(...){
....
break label;
}
}
}
}
*Pan Pan*2 -
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 haha7 -
When I'm reviewing code that I'm soon to be working on, I like to add comments to document things that aren't self-documenting.
When I encounter something I have no fucking idea about, I usually add:
// NFI
It's my "safe for work" way to indicate that I literally have no fucking idea what they were attempting.
So I'm curious, does anyone have their own comment "codes" that are safe for commits, but translate into something more awesome?3 -
I'm learning Vue.js at home but I'm forced to learn Knockout.js at work because of legacy code. Makes me want to jump out a window.1
-
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. -
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.
-
The guy who wrote a ton of legacy code at my company apparently had no idea that you need to close a file stream. And also that IO may throw exceptions.
Wooo1 -
It is fascinating to see how my motivation and productivity decreases while working on legacy code.2
-
We have a an existing legacy project full of sh*t. I am developing now an additional feature. What will you do if the one who will review your code is the one who developed this legacy project in the first place? @@#&#-$
-
I really do wish that there are parallel universes. So, there might be a universe where I am not maintaining legacy code.1
-
Went bug hunting only to land in a controller method that's 125+ lines long, riddled with side effects, and.... no tests!
-
So you're telling me that you have no documentation, and your app business logic is made on only observables?
Uh no thanks. -
The moment when your code is like,
Yeah I'm working, not throwing errors, but not doing anything closely related to the things I should do.
Fuck this construct, I'll recode the whole thing and stop using any two-year old legacy code, for this project -
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
7 -
By Thor (not the god, the dragon), Belial and Thor (the god, this time)...
Just got the sources for the software that runs on the SDR for my project. I think I just found the mother of all legacy code:
The whole behaviour is described in a single, 4000 lines C file. Most of the code is in a giant switch with cases selected from an enumeration with names that don't match their function. All varnames are overly long, yet hopelessly unhelpful. And why three fuck would you use pointer[0].data instead of (*pointer).data or pointer->data like a sane person would !? pointer isn't even an array, so why would you use []?1 -
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.2 -
Three months ago I called function smartToggle(). And now I don't understand what this very smart shit is doing2
-
That feel when you retire 152 files worth of dead code...
The diff was so big, it crashed our review tool! -
Just reed a comment in the fucking shitty codebase im working on :
/* temporary fix */
I’m fucking done guys !
2 -
Took over a project where a dev created a table with no primary key and enforce a unique constraint in code. Wtf? He also always selected top 1 so if you added a record directly in the table it completely fucked the expected data.
So, when I took this piece of shit over I didn't realize what the table was and when I tried to convert it to EF it barfed since there was no PK. Was a complete PITA and had to create all new tables.
Some people shouldn't develop software!!!!!!!!! -
Man... I hate refactoring. After I had finished up an issue this morning, I had to refactor old sql queries and the parsing to the views.
I've worked on it all day and I still haven't finished! Still loving my job, tasks like these are unavoidable but they drain the life out of me.3 -
Client: "I've started as a software developer too" *chuckling* "so I understand EXACTLY what you say... But could you just explain me what do you mean with 'legacy code' ?"
Me: :|2 -
When the previous developer doesn't appear to know what casting is...
var foo = Convert.ToBoolean(objDictionary["someKey"].ToString());1 -
You know I really hate uncommented legacy code especially when it was written by the PM himself years before and will never admit fault with this God awful unholy hell spawn
-
Give me your legacy, your undocumented,
Your huddled classss yearning to be bug free,
The wretched security holes of your multiple backdoors.
Send these, the testless, spaghetti-code to me,
I lift my keyboard beside the golden door! -
The feeling after you refactor 4000+ lines of ugly legacy code into 2000 lines of code placed in a framework ...these 4000 lines also all one document
-
Finish this one project which already takes way too long and like an onion there always appear new layers of fucked-up once I get through one of them.
-
When I want to travel back in time I take a look into the legacy code I've wrote more than a 10 years ago.
-
Made a rant about working with shitty legacy code and still doing that. So making something new would be nice.
-
Working on a piece of code, first created in 1994 and has had constant changes and modifications till 2014
I need to take it and turn it into a procedure library and new methods and classes and I have 3 weeks to do it.
Worst off I'm a junior programmer and I only have 9 months experience with the language5 -
!Rant
Why in hell did we try to get smart with this shit!? As simple as storing 2 values and reading them... But no... Someone wanted to get pretty with it, stored the two values but just read one because the other can be calculated...
Makes sense (btw it's [field] in minutes and [field] in seconds)... Some problems:
1. Why? Oh because someone designed it as int...
2. Why not just in seconds? Fuck you that's why...
3. Who the fuck thought that getting seconds from minutes is better then getting minutes from seconds when we only store integer values?
Thank you... I feel better4 -
Does anyone watch the movie The Mack (1973)?
Today I am working with some legacy code written by a shitty developer who isn't with us anymore. Every time I make a change the code screams at me with problems.
Every error makes me feel like saying this quote from Goldie the pimp...
"List to me and listen good. I don't give a shit what happened to you!.......get back out there and get me my money!" -
My company never used unit tests. And i would love to educate but i do not know how to unit test properly. I always en up with: if i want to properly test all ins and outs of this class's + operator. I need to add checks for positive number, negative numbers, nan, infinites, nulls etc. Etc. It needs so many tests for something so stupidly simple, that i don't see a way to motivate people to use it.
Am i missing something? Is there a guideline for "ok coverage"? Is testing just that much work and is that why nobody cares until it is too late?
I have been reading a book about working with legacy code. But still i got no answers. Halp!7 -
Did it ever happen to you that you were needed to map a mental and overly complex for no reason db schema to a simple json, and you hate yourself more every key you press because rewriting it more efficiently and simply is never an option?
How do you cope with managers and legacy code?
If it works does not necessarily mean that we should keep it, jesus christ.2 -
I don't think I'll ever understand how someone can complain about a legacy code base in one breath, and then justify a bad design with "that's how the system does it everywhere else" in the next.1
-
I don't understand how people write such poorly indented code. It really boogles my mind how they can live with it.
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Today I had to spend the whole day fixing a stupid bug in a legacy application in a completely different tech stack than I'm used to...
At my company we have an Internet application running where we can upload a word document and using some mailmerge variables magic, can set those vars and receive the personalised word doc back...
Now this is great, when it's working, and is used in various projects we have up and running... Suddenly the application decides to crap out for no apparent reason and guess who drew the short straw....
Anyhow I ask our sys admin for the password to the server, I remote desktop to it, turns out its a fucking Windows 2008 server...
But wait it gets better, the application, a shoddy mess of c# code, is not under any sort of version control, has to be developed on that same server and to top it all of, I have to follow some obscure barely documented deployment precedure to get my changes live....
So after a lot of cursing on the dev (not working at the company any more) who did the original setup, and hours of painstakingly piecing together how it works and what went wrong and how to fix it, I finally managed to get it working....
After this rant, I'm mailing my technical lead about this in the hopes we can get someone to do it right (yes, I'm that naive)1 -
We use MDD!! I coined this term one night after getting frustrated and having a lot of drinks. What's that, you ask?
MAGIC DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT
It's when you're working on a not-so-recent code base and are afraid to make any changes in fear of breaking things up. You've touched some modules, and now you restrict yourself to work only on those treating all others as a blackbox. Even if something can be achieved by a small change in one of the blackboxes, you still go for multiple changes in the modules you're familiar with! Such is the horror. You start saying that those modules work by some dark magic that nobody understands! -
Just read Uncle Bobs book series:
Working with Legacy Code,
Clean Coder,
Clean Code,
Clean Architecture
Read it in this exact order and each book was better than the one before.
What did you think of them and what other books do you recommend reading?
(Coding books of course)2 -
!rant
When you get the go ahead to scrap the old legacy code and design it from the ground up
feels_good.jpg -
Second Monday rant...
F%$@ YOU Visual Basic 6, your STOOOOOOOOPID SSTab control bullshit and the fact that I can't remove a tab by simply clicking a "Delete" button! -
I started a months ago in a new company and I grab a horrible legacy system and what makes me more angry is they know the code isn't code and isn't fit our new reality but they don't want to refactor the same.
So which more features we produce more bugs comes along because the legacy code bugs still on there.3 -
I just got cancer. "full stack" wrote this:
var steams = [] ;
for (var key in images) {
streams[streams.length] = fs.createWriteStream(images.imageName);
streams[streams.length - 1].on('close', function (filename) {.....
why, Why Why and how did you come up with something this bad?
Dude creates an empty array to populate it with write streams just so he can pop each one two lines below and attach a listener.
It's the first thing I checked in this application and I'm afraid what else I'm gonna find.2 -
Legacy code was so bad that it created the existence of my team to do a refactor and rewrite.
(Outsource to in house) -
I so hate working with legacy db code! I wish I could migrate all to entity framework but the migration is a pain in the ass and would take hours which the client wouldn't like.
1 -
When the previous dev's function returns null instead of an empty list when no results were found. Why?!
-
FOR FUCKING FUCK SAKE
I have a shit ton work to do. Just finished (hopefully) all of my exams, came back to work and got tasked with simultaneously developing a new app (Android), adjusting some of my own code to work with client's specific requirements in completely different project (C#) and also I have to fix a legacy app (Android) because UE comitee will be visiting us on wendesday.
I've never seen this code earlier. I've never seen this WHOLE SHITTY PROJECT. Guy that was developing this left few years back.
It's a complete spaghetti. 550 FUCKING LINES OF CODE for a one class, most of the methods are deprecated and won't even try to work on Android > 4.0. No documentation. Nothing works. Whole code is ridden with bugs, warnings and looks like it's glued together with duct tape. I even had to migrate from fucking Maven to Gradle it's that old. -
I had a discussion with my colleagues about my bachelor thesis.
Together we created within the last 18 month a REST-API where we use LDAP/LMDB as database (tree structured storage). Of course our data is relational and of course we have a high redundancy there. It's a 170 call API and I highly doubt that it's actually conforming REST.
Ensuring DB integrity is done in the backend and coding style there is "If we change it at one place, let's make sure to also change it everywhere else", so you get a good impression how much of spaghetti code we have there.
Now I proposed to code a solution in my bachelor thesis where we use a relational database (we even have an administrated Oracle DB with high availability) and have a write-only layer to also store the data in LDAP but my colleagues said that "it would add too much complexity to the system".
Instead I should write the relational layer myself and fetch the data somehow from the existing LDAP tree.
What the actual fuck, spaghetti code is what makes the system really unnecessarily complex so that no one will understand that code in 2 years.
Congratulations, you just created legacy code that went into production in 2018 while not accepting the opportunity to let that legacy code get eliminated.
Now good luck with running and maintaining that system and it's inconsistencies.1 -
So I have a very important question. I don’t really contribute on Github because I’m not good with any code that isn’t mine, I don’t understand it I don’t know why they did it or if I would have come up with it and I especially don’t know how to add on to it or fix it.. am I hopeless?2
-
Is it unreasonable to refuse the tickets and to demand that the dev who came up with the God awful solution should make it work?1
-
This comment is why iis is an abomination for allowing multiple languages
/*Didn't know how to do this in php so wrote in asp just call it do do the task*/ -
Last year my boss decided to outsource a project I did the year before to another company.
Now he wants my opinion on why this company estimates 10h to do an upgrade on a API interface I did on that project.
Like I remember details on what I did two years ago. And like I have any idea how this company is rigged to handle the project. -
Dreading the end of this bank holiday weekend, tomorrow I must wake up and return to working with legacy code.
-
Inherited a project with random include '*.php' and mysql_* functions littered everywhere, this will be fun 😀😂😐😔😞😭
-
I have been working on a really interesting project for the last 6 months, now they put it on hold because another department wants something else done.
Now I have to go back and work with shitty tech and horrible legacy code.
They said is only for a month or so, but I can feel that it will be more, way more.
I feel like it is bothering me more than it should, probably because the other project was mine since day one and was way more enjoyable to work with.
Part of me wants to quit because of this, part of me tells me that I need to wait and I will get the other project back.
What would you do? How can I shut up my internal quitter voice? -
One of those debugging days where minutes feel like hours, and hours like days.
I had the bad luck of being asked to dive into a legacy project which was unmaintained for months, but of course it's still on prod. And very suddenly the urgent need arrises to change stuff.
Yet: the docker stack won't work. It builds fine but the stack crashes.
Long story short: some internal api URI were renamed and at some point one internal api started to always require an access token. Which we set for the stage, prod env yet somebody forgot to mention that to the devs of legacy-project.
That ain't too bad.
WHAT IS FUCKING BAD IS THAT YOUR SHITTY APP SWALLOWS THE ERROR MESSAGE!
I mean it's bad enough I have to `var_dump && die` your app since you never bothered to setup a xdebug that I could use out of the box, yet egregious fact that your app would catch a valid exception but transforms it into an "internal warning" is borderline insane!
It's ok to throw exceptions. It's ok to let your service die. That's how other will know what and where to fix it. (You may want to restrict the data visible to the outside, but that's a whole different conversation.) -
Reworking old java apps. Holy shit im gratefull i can use spring boot.
But this code is handsdown awfull. Every file contains more ifs than other words. upto 6 layers deep. Thank god its at least properly commented.
But seriously how did this shit ever pass any QA. All legacy apps around here are a massive pile of if statements.2 -
I'm in need of advice. I reckon this is no stack overflow but that's probably for the best as I wouldn't feel as comfortable posting there as I am doing it here. So, back to the question: I'm currently working with legacy code, written in .NET 2.0. This code is responsible for calling upon PEC services in order to finally create personal smart cards. I was tasked with the job of creating a repository system that would allow the program to call on the old legacy services or the new ones without any distinction. We are talking about SOAP services in both cases. The issues is: the new service definition is comprised of soap policies. This wouldn't be a problem per se, with more modern version of the framework, but with .NET 2.0? Yes, it is. It doesn't support policies and signing the body with a certificate right out of the box. How can I manage this? I feel like the only way would be letting the proxy class do its thing up until the very last moment: intercept the SOAP request before its sent and modify it according to the specifications. But I reckon this is very bad practice. Is there any other way out of this?
Thanks for anyone that would like to help. 🙂7 -
I hate you legacy code.
I don't want to edit à 3k+ lines long SQL code 😭
I hate the time when people used to use stored procedures...3 -
Currently debugging a project that was written over 4 years ago...
At first all was well in the world, besides the ever present issue off our goddamn legacy framework. This framework was written 7 years ago on top of an existing open source one, because the existing one was 'lacking some features' & 'did not feel right'.
Now those might be perfectly fine reasons to write a layer on top of a framework, but please, for all future devs sanities, write fucking documentation and maintain it if you're going to use said framework in all major projects!!
Anyhow back to the situation at hand, I'm getting familiar with the project, sighing at the use of our stupid legacy framework, attempting to recreate the reported bugs...
Turns out I can't, well I get other bugs & errors, but not the reported ones. I go to the production server, where I suddenly do can reproduce them...
Already thinking, fuck my life, and scared for the results... I try a 'git status' on the production server....
And yep, there it is, lo and behold, fucking changes on production, that are not in git, fuck you previous dev who worked on this and your stupid lazy ass modifcations on production!
Bleh, already feeling royally pissed, there's only 1 thing I can do, push changes back to git in a seperate branch, and pray I can merge them back in master on my dev environment without to much issues...
Only I first have to get our sysadmi. to allow pushing from a production server back to our git server...
Sigh, going to put on my headphones, retreat to my me space and try to sort out this shitpile now... -
Anyone want to help me debug some legacy code that hasn't gotten enough attention lately?
The US government could really use some help. Maybe we could debug it and present our findings to Trump, our all powerful carrot overlord.1 -
I wrote my first proper promise today
I'm building a State-driven, ajax fed Order/Invoice creation UI which Sales Reps use to place purchases for customers over the phone. The backend is a mutated PHP OSCommerce catalog which I've been making strides in refactoring towards OOP/eliminating spahgetti code and the need for a massive bootstrapper file which includes a ton of nonsense (I started by isolating the session and several crucial classes dealing with currency, language and the cart)
I'm using raw JS and jquery with copious reorganization.
I like state driven design, so I write all my data objects as classes using a base class with a simple attribute setter, and then extend the class and define it's attributes as an array which is passed to the parent setter in the construct.
I have also populateFromJson method in the parent class which allows me to match the attribute names to database fields in the backend which returns via ajax.
I achieve the state tracking by placing these objects into an array which underscore.js Observe watches, and that triggers methods to update the DOM or other objects.
Sure, I could do this in react but
1) It's in an admin area where the sales reps using it have to use edge/chrome/Firefox
2) I'm still climbing the react learning curve, so I can rapid prototype in jquery faster instead of getting hung up on something I don't understand
3) said admin area already uses jquery anyway
4) I like a challenge
Implementing promises is quickly turning messy jquery ajax calls into neat organized promise based operations that fit into my state tracking paradigm, so all jquery is responsible for is user interaction events.
The big flaw I want to address is that I'm still making html elements as JS strings to generate inputs/fields into the pseudo-forms.
Can anyone point me in the direction of a library or practice that allows me to generate Dom elements in a template-style manner.4 -
Saw this in some legacy code today at work:
Long sid = object.getSid();
Long returnValue = (Long) sid.longValue();
Never can be too careful I guess...
/s -
This article about the types of legacy code bases you will have to deal with just made my day!
Not only do I have every one it describes but somehow it even made me laugh at thought of each of the std riddled petri dishes of code that I reluctantly maintain... My "Happy Place" is a folder dedicated to reliquary projects I like to look at when I feel sad to lift my spirits and restore hope that one day things will be better.
Do you have any definitions to add or know where to find more? I'm hooked.
Link: https://medium.com/@dylanbeattie/...
Excerpt:
The Reliquary
The reliquary is that one repository full of really good ideas. Clean code. Brilliant algorithms. The OpenID implementation that you optimised until it shone. Classes so beautifully designed and perfectly documented that they’d make a senior architect weep.
You remember the big rewrite? The project that was going to fix everything, only you never worked out how to actually launch the thing, or get any revenue from it? The reliquary is where you’ve preserved it, pickled in revision control like a fabulous museum specimen. A treasury of good code and good ideas; maybe even an entire codebase that was “a couple of weeks” away from shipping before somebody finally looked at the number of critical features the team had somehow forgotten to include and discovered — to everybody’s surprise — that validated XHTML, normalised data models and 95% test coverage are not actually features any of your end users cared about.
Like Buran or the Spruce Goose, the surviving artefacts stand as a testament to the quality of your engineering… and a poignant reminder of just how much fun engineers can have building high-quality stuff that nobody actually wants to use. -
I'd like to be able to travel back in time to ask the writer of legacy code whether they were taking drugs when they wrote it... #WouldExplainWhy
-
I always keep a Windows XP VM ready. Why? Because that fucking ancient switch with it's whacky setup can't run without Java and SSLv3 in the browser.1
-
Who knew FE development could be so much fun (working on FE tasks after months of shitty legacy BE code).
-
Dont be that guy, ok. Just clean up your shit and don't let shit go through you.
I will git blame you. I will judge you.
#leaveitbetterthanyoufoundit
2 -
Began working on an old project at work today. It has been about 6 months since I last touched it and 10 months since I began working here. No one that works here knew how to get the project running on anything other than one specific computer in the office...i work remotely. So instead of remoting in I finally figured out how to run it on my computer!
*crash*
Turns out it only runs on vista.... -
I've been working on an issue on and off for the past few weeks. The QA tests failed, so the ball is back in my court again. The data our analysts are testing from comes from a mysterious spreadsheet that no one knows where it came from, while my data is coming from some obscure database table. After asking around it turns out that the table hasn't been maintained for who knows how long, and nobody really knows what the data is used for... I feel like a freaking archaeologist.2
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Nice to meet you, where you've been? I can show you legacy code.
C, Python, Ruby and Node.
OMG, look at this line, pretty sure it isn't mine -
Built my first MVC application today. Building proof of concepts to hopefully modernize my workplace!1
-
Nothing can take the joy out of programming more, than having to redo and implement new features in uncommented legacy code, that takes 2x as long to understand than to actually code.
- Gonna be a long ass week. -
Code comment in legacy codebase that says "Mr.Foo Bar doesnt understand why this is required but removing it may result in spontaneous combustion"
-
Working on legacy code with Ant/CVS setup. I tried for a day but easily gave up and abandoned the idea of running locally using maven
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When legacy jquery code is so jumbled that you have to carry that code to your home as well to work it out
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Today I spend more time writing spaces after commas and between operators while working with legacy code than actually adding new features and fixing Bugs.
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Same lol