Manager: 'Please remove this checkbox from that page.'

Me: 'Sure thing, it was stupid anyway. Just gimme a couple of minutes.'

Legacy code: 'LOL the checkbox is wired to everything else and if you simply remove it the backend will shit itself. There is several hundred lines of inline Javascript in the HTML template with some Thymeleaf stuff managing the form data or just are there to make the code less readable. The controller for the page is a bit more than a thousand lines of spaghetti, no easy way to find where is that specific data necessary and where can be easily removed. Class variables declared between methods, dozens of nested if statements checking shit in every method and the data is passed through like half a dozen other classes. Good luck with that!'

Me: '💩.'

PM used his wife's data in testing against legacy data.
Discovered she had different social number before they met.
Apparently she was also a he.....

Might be a interesting evening for him.

Worst legacy experience...

Called in by a client who had had a pen test on their website and it showed up many, many security holes. I was tasked with coming in and implementing the required fixes.

Site turned out to be Classic ASP built on an MS Access database. Due to the nature of the client, everything had to be done on their premises (kind of ironic but there you go). So I'm on-site trying to get access to code and server. My contact was *never* at her desk to approve anything. IT staff "worked" 11am to 3pm on a long day. The code itself was shite beyond belief.

The site was full of forms with no input validation, origin validation and no SQL injection checks. Sensitive data stored in plain text in cookies. Technical errors displayed on certain pages revealing site structure and even DB table names. Server configured to allow directory listing in file stores so that the public could see/access whatever they liked without any permission or authentication checks. I swear this was written by the child of some staff member. No company would have had the balls to charge for this.

Took me about 8 weeks to make and deploy the changes to client's satisfaction. Could have done it in 2 with some support from the actual people I was suppose to be helping!! But it was their money (well, my money as they were government funded!).

One step through the door my wife whips around, a look so disgusted she barely seems human. "What's that smell?" she cries. "It's you! You smell like...like bad code!"

Indeed, I am covered with the scent of the forbidden love child of a man who read half a chapter on if-then statements and then pushed out into the world, earthworm-like, a mangled misshapened gelatinous mass that my employer gave the title of line-of-business application purely out of pity.

For more days than I'd like to count I have been porting a ColdFusion 5 application to .NET. Initially written in 2000 and last touched in 2006, it has a data architecture comparable to Dresden after the second world war. It features a table solely comprised of seven columns of IDs so that joins can be made between other tables lacking a common key. Columns that should be contained within a single table spread out among multiple tables. Single columns containing data that should be multiple columns (with handy flags to separate the subsets). A view with 14 joins that playfully displays unintended results. And so much more spread out over almost 200 stored procedures, views, triggers, and tables on the SQL server, and dozens of additional ADO-like SQL statements within the ColdFusion itself. Fortunately, the application overcomes these issues by having absolutely no data validation while allowing nulls pretty much everywhere.

When I am done this will be a very nice ASP.NET MVC app with at least 150 less stored procs, views, and tables. Auto-generated duplicate entries will be a thing of the past. Pop-up windows that inexplicably refresh the underlying screen to display a different part of the program than the one the user wants will be eliminated. And a UI based on the colors of a Rubik's Cube with usability that Mr. Rubik would find challenging will disappear with only the trauma of using it left behind.

Sadly, this is not my worse legacy code experience. Just the most recent. Just the most recent stench added to a lifetime of bathing in code rot.

I had a manager who was a complete incompetent idiot (other than a fucking backstabber). He left the company ~3 weeks ago, yet I believe it would take 5 years to get rid of his legacy.

Today I discovered that one of his "genius ideas" led to the loss of months of data. This is already bad, but it's even more upsetting given that the records that have been lost are exactly the ones I needed to prove the validity of my project.

That fucking man keeps fucking with me even when he's not here, YOU DAMN ASSHOLE!!

Ooh this is good.

At my first job, i was hired as a c++ developer. The task seemed easy enough, it was a research and the previous developer died, leaving behind a lot of documentation and some legacy fortran code. Now you might not know, but fortran can be really easily converted to c, and then refactored to c++.

Fine, time to read the docs. The research was on pollen levels, cant really tell more. Mostly advanced maths. I dug through 500+ pages of algebra just to realize, theres no way this would ever work. Okay dont panic, im a data analyst, i can handle this.

Lets take a look at the fortran code, maybe that makes more sense. Turns out it had nothing to do with the task. It looped through some external data i couldnt find anywhere and thats it. Yay.

So i exported everything we had to a csv file, wrote a java program to apply linefit with linear regression and filter out the bad records. After that i spent 2 days in a hot server room, hoping that the old intel xeon wouldnt break down from sending java outputs directly to haskell, but it held on its own.

No comments allowed in JSON pisses me off so much.

Sure, I get all the arguments of "it's supposed to be a data-only format for machines", "there are alternatives which support comments", and "you can add comments and then minify the file before parsing"

But right now, when I just need to put a quick note inside a super confusing legacy package manager config about why certain dependencies to be frozen at a specific version, IT FUCKING PISSES ME OFF THAT I CAN'T JUST ADD A FUCKING COMMENT.

It was 1999. I was just starting my first real job as a programmer for a major insurance company. We were working on code that would screen scrape legacy mainframe data output and convert it to a web-based UI. REALLY stupid project approach I had no input on. I happened to find a programmer in Germany who had released his code in the public domain that would help with making a certain conversion task easier. I downloaded his code and put it to work.

During a code review, a programmer who was probably about 60 asked me where I got the code and what it was doing. I didn't even get to the part about what it was doing because he made fun of me so badly, in a fake German accent in front of a room full of non-programmers, for using code that today is no big deal due to the prevalence of open source. I just clammed up in humiliation because he got everyone laughing at me. His philosophy was if we didn't buy it or write it ourselves, we had no business using it.

I guess I was just ahead of my time?

In the begining of time, when The Company was small and The Data could fit in some fucking excel sheets, Those Who Came Before implemented some java tool to issue invoices, notify customers and clear received payments.

Then came the Time Of The Great Expanse, when The Company grew to unthinkable levels. Headcount increased with each passing day, and The Data shows that everything was going great!

But when the future seemed bright, came The Stall-Out. The days when The Company could not expand as fast as it did before. And Those Who Came Before left, abandoning their Undocumented Java Tool to its own luck.

Those who came after knew nothing of the inner workings of the Undocumented Java Tool. They knew only that the magical Jar would take a couple fucking excel spreadsheets and spit out reports and send emails like magic.
And those were The Dark Days.

In the darkness, The Data grew to be a monster. Soon a fucking excel spreadsheet could not hold The Data contained any longer. Those Who Came After, fearing the wrath of The Undocumented Java Tool, dared not mess with its code. Instead, they fucking cut away the lowest volume transactions from the fucking input spreadsheet, and left the company to report the unbilled invoices as "surprise losses". Fucking script kiddies, were Those Who Came After.

Then, at The Darkest of Days (literally, Dec 21st), marched into the project The Six Witchers, who fear not the Demon of Refactoring.

This story is still unfolding. Will The Six Witchers manage to unravel the mysteries of The Undocumented Java Tool? Will they be able to reverse engineer the fucking black box, and scale it's magic into a modern application?
Will they decrease revenue forecasting error by at least 2% in a single strike?

Only the future will tell.

So I had a fun week.

It started off with my boss replying to a co-workers email where he sent his new bank account, saying he doesn't need it untill we close off some baddly planned projects, meaning no paycheck.

Needless to say we were working night and days including weekends on it and put our best into it.

For the next part I need to explain a little background. We have this old legacy system I'm working with for the past 3 years. I keet raising the red flag we need a new one. Nothing happened. So every time I worked with it I kept thinking how to improve the parts. Almost two years went into thinking and planning the new system untill I got a green light. It was most satisfying - the day I got to build something good and awesome. I drew all the data structures, laid out the foundations and started building ontop of it. It was amazing and I was really proud of it. Then suddendly client wanted to see something and the decision was made we threw it together quickly with the old legacy system. It was on hold 'till then due to work overload.

Boss wrote me this week if I can put the project from git on a server, where he out sourced the completition into India where they will finish it. On thr question if they can't work on git, he replied: "should they?" -.-

To top it all up, I got a notice at the end of the week if I don't fill his shit time tracking system (that takes me one hour/day to insert all entries) by monday he'll deduct a sizable portion of my paycheck.

I AM WORKING FOR YOU ALL THE FUCKING TIME BECAUSE YOU LACK RESOURCES AND I THOUGHT A TEAM STICKS TOGETHER AND SAVES EACH OTHERS ASS! I DONT HAVE TIME TO ENTER YOUR FUCKING STUPID TIME ENTRIES IN YOUR FUCKING BUGGED SYSTEM EACH DAY ON TASKS THAT DON'T EVEN EXIST BITCH! MAKE IT BETTER FIRST!! OH! AND NO ONE IS MORE QUALIFIED TO FINISH THAT PROJECT THAN ME, I POURED MY FUCKING HEART INTO IT YOU PRICK!

woah.

Oh man. Mine are the REASON why people dislike PHP.

Biggest Concern: Intranet application for 3 staff members that allows them to set the admin data for an application that our userbase utilizes. Everything was fucking horrible, 300+ php files of spaghetti that did not escape user input, did not handle proper redirects, bad algo big O shit and then some. My pain point? I was testing some functionality when upon clicking 3 random check boxes you would get an error message that reads something like this "hi <SENSITIVE USERNAME DATA> you are attempting to use <SERVER IP ADDRESS> using <PASSWORD> but something went wrong! Call <OLD DEVELOPER's PHONE NUMBER> to provide him this <ERROR CODE>"

I panicked, closed that shit and rewrote it in an afternoon, that fucking retard had a tendency to use over 400 files of php for the simplest of fucking things.

Another one, that still baffles me and the other dev (an employee that has been there since the dawn of time) we have this massive application that we just can't rewrite due to time constraints. there is one file with (shit you not) a php include function that when you reach the file it is including it is just......a php closing tag. Removing it breaks down the application. This one is over 6000 files (I know) and we cannot understand what in the love of Lerdorf and baby Torvalds is happening.

From a previous job we had this massive in-house Javascript "framework" for ajax shit that for whatever reason unknown to me had a bunch of function and object names prefixed with "hotDog<rest of the function name>", this was used by two applications. One still in classic ASP and the other in php version 4.something

Legacy apps written in Apache Velocity, which in itself is not that bad, but I, even as a PHP developer, do not EVER mix views with logic. I like my shit separated AF thank you very much.

A large mobile application that interfaced with fucking everything via webviews. Shit was absolutley fucking disgusting, and I felt we were cheating our users.

A rails app with 1000 controller methods.

An express app with 1000 router methods with callbacks instead of async await even though async await was already a thing.

ultraFuckingLarge Delphi project with really no consideration for best practices. I, to this day enjoy Object Pascal, but the way in which people do delphi can scare me.

ASP.NET Application in wich there seemed to be a large portion of bolted in self made ioc framework from the lead dev, absolute shitfest, homie refused to use an actual ioc framework for it, they did pay the price after I left.

My own projects when I have to maintain them.

A lot of engineering fads go in circle.

Architecture in the 80s: Mainframe and clients.

Architecture in the 90s: Software systems connected by an ESB.

Architecture in the 2000s: Big central service and everyone connects to it for everything

Architecture in the 2010s: Decentralized microservices that communicate with queues.

Current: RabbitMQ and Kafka.

... Can't we just go back to the 90s?

I hate fads.
I hate when I have to get some data, and it's scattered on 20 different servers, and to load a fucking account page, a convoluted network of 40 apps have to be activated, some in PHP, others in JS, others on Java, that are developed by different teams, connected to different tiny ass DBs, all on huge clusters of tiny ass virtual machines that get 30% load at peak hours, 90% of which comes from serializing and parsing messages. 40 people maintaining this nightmare, that could've been just 7 people making a small monolithic system that easily handles this workload on a 4-core server with 32GB of RAM.
Tripple it, put it behind a load balancer, proper DB replication (use fucking CockroachDB if you really want survivability), and you've got zero downtime at a fraction of the cost.

Just because something's cool now, doesn't mean that everybody has to blindly follow it for fucks sake!

Same rant goes for functional vs OOP and all that crap. Going blindly with any of these is just a stupid fad, and the main reason why companies need refactoring of legacy code.

The situation right now:

Our client: full of legacy desktop solutions that always ran inside a VPN, but wanting to modernize the system and migrate to be hosted in the cloud.

Our first project with them: Frontend built with Angular, backend in a serverless model, all with GraphQL and heavily tested to assure quality. The system is mostly an internal software for management, but the backed may receive data from an App.

The problem: all management users have weak passwords (like "12345", "password", or their first name).

The solution: restrict our system to be accessible only inside the VPN

The new problem: how the mobile app will send data to our backend?

The new solution: Let's duplicate the backend, one public and the other private. The public one will accept only a few GraphQL operations.

------

This could be avoided if the passwords weren't so easily deductible

Well, for starters there was a cron to restart the webserver every morning.

The product was 10+ years old and written in PHP 5.3 at the time.

Another cron was running every 15 minutes, to "correct" data in the DB. Just regular data, not from an import or something.
Gotta have one of those self-healing systems I guess.

Yet another cron (there where lots) did run everyday from 02:00 to 4ish to generate the newest xlsx report. Almost took out the entire thing every time. MySQL 100%. CPU? Yes. RAM? You bet.

Lucky I wasn't too much involved at the time. But man, that thing was the definition of legacy.

Fun fact: every request was performed twice! First request gave the already logged-in client an unique access-token. Second request then processed the request with the (just issued) access-token; which was then discarded. Security I guess.

I don't know why it was build this way. It just was. I didn't ask. I didn't wanted to know. Some things are better left undisturbed. Just don't anger the machine. I became superstitious for a while. I think, in the end, it help a bit: It feels like communicating with an alien monster but all you have is a trumpet and chewing gum. Gentle does it.

Oh and "Sencha Extjs 3" almost gave me PTSD lol (it's an ancient JS framework). Followed by SOAPs WSDL cache. And a million other things.

When the department’s large plotter printer broke down, the users demanded they still be able to execute their large reports. The area manager understood reality, if we are waiting on parts, not a lot we can do, but one developer decided to re-write the report/application as a web/.asp application. Mind you, he wasn’t a web developer, mostly VB experience, so the ‘report’ executed the same queries and filled up simple html tables. Did it work? Sort of. The output had none of the specialized formatting like headers, grouping, summary calculations, etc. Since the users could see the data in the web browser and scroll left/right, they were OK with the temporary fix. When I heard this:
Me: “You do know the application could output the report in HTML exactly the way it prints to the printer. All we would have to do enable that feature in the application.”
Dev: “Yea, but I thought it would be cool to do it as a web app.”
Me: “OK, but we should just update the app.”
Dev: “Um...that is going to be difficult, the boss liked my idea so much, he wanted the report replaced with my asp application. I deleted the application from source control and from the network. Sorry.”
Me: “OMFG!…tell me you make a backup!”
Dev: “Ha!...no…boss said you would fight innovation. Web is the future.”
Me: ”What is going to happen when the printer is fixed!? Users are going to flip”
Dev: “Oh, we didn’t think of that. Oh well, that’s your problem now.”
Me: “WTF? My problem?”
Dev: “Yea, you are moving to the team responsible for those legacy applications, since innovation really isn’t your thing. I just got promoted to senior developer.”

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?!

If anyone has been keeping up with my data warehouse from hell stories, we're reaching the climax. Today I reached my breaking point and wrote a strongly worder email about the situation. I detailed 3 separate cases of violated referential integrity (this warehouse has no constraints) and a field pulling from THE WRONG FLIPPING TABLE. Each instance was detailed with the lying ER diagram, highlighted the violating key pairs, the dangers they posed, and how to fix it. Note that this is a financial document; a financial document with nondeterministic behavior because the previous contractors' laziness. I feel like the flipping harbinger of doom with a cardboard sign saying "the end is near" and keep having to self-validate that if I was to change anything about this code, **financial numbers would change**, names would swap, description codes would change, and because they're edge cases in a giant dataset, they'll be hard to find. My email included SQL queries returning values where integrity is violated 15+ times. There's legacy data just shoved in ignoring all constraints. There are misspellings where a new one was made instead of updating, leaving the pk the same.

Now I'd just put sorting and other algos, but the data is processed by a crystal report. It has no debugger. No analysis tools. 11 subreports. The thing takes an hour to run and 77k queries to the oracle backend. It's one of the most disgusting infrastructures I've ever seen. There's no other solution to this but to either move to a general programming language or get the contractor to fix the data warehouse. I feel like I've gotten nowhere trying to debug this for 2 months. Now that I've reached what's probably the root issue, the office beaucracy is resisting the idea of throwing out the fire hazard and keeping the good parts. The upper management wants to just install sprinklers, and I'm losing it.

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...

Team of developers suggest one of our legacy services is a nightmare to maintain, terrible to develop on top of and is fundamentally wrong in terms of data and application structure.

They are 100% correct and I fully endorse their request to redevelop it.

I'm less enthusiastic that their new version is much worse than the original...

Everybody is criticizing Microsoft for leaving too much legacy code in Windows, etc., but let me tell you that I prefer 100% that and have lifetime backward compatibility than having to deal with Google bullshit.

Google sucks ass.
It's one of the most dev unfriendly company on this planet (along with Facebook).

You can't fucking change BASIC stuff in Android SDK every fucking version.
You just can't!

You can't use a system of "PERMISSIONS" each developer has to set in its application and each user has to accept during the installation, that a few versions later become USELESS... because "Hmmm… no, It's not enough, let's make a new privileged permission that makes the old one fucking worthless".

YOU FUCKING, TOXIC, BASTARDS.

It's my app, my code, my device, my fucking conditions. If I want to install viruses on my device, I should be able to do it.
I shouldn't have to call fucking Sundar fucking Pichai fucking CEO of fucking GOOGLE.

USERS != BABIES.
DEVS != CRIMINALS

We are the reason you have a fucking job, fucking food on your fucking table.

I want a fucking GOD_MODE permission in the next SDK, assholes!

You can't REMOVE fucking "Android.OS.getSerial()" making it only for system apps.
It's not sensible data… and if It's in your opinion, you've already created a "android.permission.READ_PHONE_STATE", so what else do you want, fucking asshole?
Right, you want to introduce "android.permission.READ_PRIVILIGED_PHONE_STATE" to make obsolete the other one, son of a bitch!

I don't fucking use you're garbage Google Play Store, no worries! I won't upload my app on your servers, bitch!

They've created a monopoly in the industrial space (PDAs) and they keep making fucking wrong decisions every single year.

My job is already stressful, why you can't just stop making it worse? fml

I never thought to I'd say this about an open-source project, but if I wanted to single out an unbeatable case of "Bad Design", and the manifestation of the term "Redundancy Hell", It is definitely Calibre.

Single job: To keep some e-book files + some metadata.
What it does in brief: In a single dir as your library; From metadata stored IN each file; It generates subdirs <author_name>/<title_name>(<some_numerical_id>), copies the e-book file there, generates a jpg cover from the first page and also stores it there, generates an xml file to support legacy e-book formats (but it generates it anyway even for pdfs), which contains all the same metadata for the file, including title, author and href for the cover, and also stores it there. And then, all the same metadata for all books is stored in a metadata.db in the library root folder. I don't know if there is more data stored/used somewhere in a more obfuscated way.

Not too much to ask: Change some author/title/any single field.
What is done: 💩🌋

It is so helpful, it does all the stuff by itself or its plugins; you don't have to touch anything. But it also has this amazing ability to fuck everything up without even being touched. I mean WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING? WHAT KIND OF A FUCKING DESIGN IS THIS? A FUCKING FRACTAL?

Literally, If I had listed all my books on physical papers with a real life pen, It would take me less time that I've already wasted on unfucking the regular disasters. Fuck you and your arrogant responses to issues.

TLDR: Ask irritating questions, you could end up saving the company money and time...

I’m working on a project where we are integrating 2 legacy web applications with each other.

Business Analyst/Project manager (BA) : Save all the contact details of the selected firm in application A into the database of application B, then expose that data later so that we can output it into the document when the user generates them.
Me: Seems a bit excessive, there’s even a fax number, nobody uses that anymore, are you sure we need all that?
BA: The old document has all that information.
Me: Please just check with client that witch fields are still needed in the document.
BA: Ok, fine, but it’s probably a waste of time…
BA: * Talks with client on phone for 10 minz *
BA: Ok client stays we only need the Lodgement Number on the document.
Me: We already store that and populate it in the document.
BA: I had budgeted 2 days labour for all that, you just saved us a lot of money!

So we had this legacy Objective-C codebase for a mobile app that was actually pretty good: I'd inherited the codebase and spent the past several years gradually improving it and I was actually quite proud of the work I put into it. So of course management decides to scrap it (with NO consultation from the engineers) and outsource a complete rewrite of the app in C# for Windows Universal.

Let me tell you. That code was without a doubt and without exaggeration the *worst* code I've seen in my close to 30 years of experience as a developer. I mean they broke every rule in the book, I'm talking rookie mistakes. Copypasta everywhere, no consistent separation of concerns, and yet way too many layers. Unnecessary layers. Layers for the sake of layers. There was en entire abstraction layer complete with a replicated version of every single data class *just* to map properties in pascal case to the same property in camel case. Adding a new field to a payload in the API amounted to hours of work and about eight different files that needed to be modified. It was a complete nightmare. This was supposed to be a thin client, yet it had a complete client-side Sqlite database with its own custom schema (oh and of course a layer for that!) completely unrelated to the serverside schema, just for kicks. The project was broken up into about eight or nine different subprojects, each having their own specific dependencies on various of the other subprojects in such a tightly-knit way that it made gradual refactoring almost impossible. This architecture was so impressively bad, it was actually self-preserving!

Suffice it to say it was a complete nightmare, and was one of the main reasons I ended up leaving that company. So just sayin', legacy code isn't always bad. :)

I had a wonderful run-in with corporate security at a credit card processing company last year (I won't name them this time).
I was asked design an application that allowed users in a secure room to receive instructions for putting gift cards into envelopes, print labels and send the envelopes to the post. There were all sorts of rules about what combinations of cards could go in which envelopes etc etc, but that wasn't the hard part.
These folks had a dedicated label printer for printing the address labels, in their secure room.
The address data was in a database in the server room.
On separate networks.
And there was absolutely no way that the corporate security folks would let an application that had access to a printer that was on a different network also have access to the address data.
So I took a look at the legacy application to see what they did, to hopefully use as a precedent.
They had an unsecured web page (no, not an API, a web page) that listed the addresses to be printed. And a Windows application running on the users' PC that was quietly scraping that page to print the labels.
Luckily, it ceased to be an issue for me, as the whole IT department suddenly got outsourced to India, so it became some Indian's problem to solve.

A big project in my company. Had some annoying race condition that caused data to get deleted when two processes finished in the wrong order they hit the dB and override each other’s work.

Long story short. Fixed the bug and in the process the codebase shrunk by 60%. I didn’t have to delete the rest of the code, but the bug was due to a function in the legacy section of the code, and found out that it was the only function used in that section.

So I deleted it. Rewrote the function so it upserts. And bam. Smaller, cleaner code :)

Why is it that virtually all new languages in the last 25 years or so have a C-like syntax?

- Java wanted to sort-of knock off C++.
- C# wanted to be Java but on Microsoft's proprietary stack instead of SUN's (now Oracle's).
- Several other languages such as Vala, Scala, Swift, etc. do only careful evolution, seemingly so as to not alienate the devs used to previous C-like languages.
- Not to speak of everyone's favourite enemy, JavaScript…
- Then there is ReasonML which is basically an alternate, more C-like, syntax for OCaml, and is then compiled to JavaScript.

Now we're slowly arriving at the meat of this rant: back when I started university, the first semester programming lecture used Scheme, and provided a fine introduction to (functional) programming. Scheme, like other variants of Lisp, is a fine language, very flexible, code is data, data is code, but you get somewhat lost in a sea of parentheses, probably worse than the C-like languages' salad of curly braces. But it was a refreshing change from the likes of C, C++, and Java in terms of approach.

But the real enlightenment came when I read through Okasaki's paper on purely functional data structures. The author uses Standard ML in the paper, and after the initial shock (because it's different than most everything else I had seen), and getting used to the notation, I loved the crisp clarity it brings with almost no ceremony at all!

After looking around a bit, I found that nobody seems to use SML anymore, but there are viable alternatives, depending on your taste:

- Pragmatic programmers can use OCaml, which has immutability by default, and tries to guide the programmer to a functional programming mindset, but can accommodate imperative constructs easily when necessary.
- F# was born as OCaml on .NET but has now evolved into its own great thing with many upsides and very few downsides; I recommend every C# developer should give it a try.
- Somewhat more extreme is Haskell, with its ideology of pure functions and lazy evaluation that makes introducing side effects, I/O, and other imperative constructs rather a pain in the arse, and not quite my piece of cake, but learning it can still help you be a better programmer in whatever language you use on a day-to-day basis.

Anyway, the point is that after working with several of these languages developed out of the original Meta Language, it baffles me how anyone can be happy being a curly-braces-language developer without craving something more succinct and to-the-point. Especially when it comes to JavaScript: all the above mentioned ML-like languages can be compiled to JavaScript, so developing directly in JavaScript should hardly be a necessity.

Obviously these curly-braces languages will still be needed for a long time coming, legacy systems and all—just look at COBOL—, but my point stands.

I really hate sales people. My stakeholder wants to buy an address verification service but is hesitant to purchase now because the dev time needed would be substantial. Now the sales rep has planted seeds of doubt in my SH and SH thinks I grossly overestimated the labor I quoted.

Sales rep is all “major corporations have installed this in a weekend.” 🤬🤬🤬 Major corporations also have more than one developer and probably aren’t dealing with a website that has a dozen address forms that all work differently. Oh, and I DON’T WORK WEEKENDS MOFO.

My SH originally requested a labor estimate for installing the AVS on all address forms and that’s what I delivered. My audit revealed a dozen different forms. I’m working with a legacy code base that’s been bandaged together and maintained by an outside dev agency. The only thing the forms have in common is reusable address fields. They all work differently when it comes to validating and submitting data to the server and they all submit to different api endpoints. At least a quarter of those forms are broken and would need to be fixed (these are mostly admin-facing). I also had to provide an estimate on frontend implementation when I have no idea what they want the FE to look like.

My estimate was 5-8 weeks for implementation AND testing. I wrote up my findings and clearly explained the labor required, why it was needed, and the time needed. All was fine until the sales rep tried to get into SH’s head.

My SH is now asking for a new estimate and hoping for 1-2 weeks of labor, which is what will SH to buy the AVS. Then go to the outside dev agency you used to work with and ask for a second opinion. I’m sure they’d also tell you at least month if not more for testing, implementation, and deployment because you have a DOZEN FORMS you want to add this to. 1-2 weeks is only possible for a single form.

My manager doesn’t work in the same coding language I do, but he read my documentation and supports my original estimate.

I honestly want to ask my SH if this sales rep is giving a very good price for the AVS. If not, are there other companies in the mix? Because right now you have a sales rep that’s taking you for a ride and trying to pressure you all so he can get another notch in his belt for getting another “major corporation” as his account. I don’t think it’s a good idea to be locked in with a grimy sales rep.

So client wants an android app that implements some legacy Epson printer SDK, works on a chinese Windows device with an android Emulator on it, connects to local Webservice that had to be configurated and ran (local Network) , sends and tracks data, if Server down then handle it on the Client and reconnect as soon as Server up, running own TCP Server on Android device that listens for specific http requests, which make the android connect to an Epson printer to start printing. The stuff that is being printed? A png file that has to be converted to a Bitmap, a QR Code that has to be generated by the bugged base64 encrypted stuff coming via http in (webserver-> Android TCP server)
Dont forget the Software Design (MVP), documentation, research etc.. Im about to finish the app , its my 5th day on this Project, the 6th day was planned to be full testing. Client Calls me and ask me how far I am, I reply, he says ok. 30 minutes later he tells me he wont pay me next time that much because this work should take 3 days, or even 2. "A senior Android developer could do this in 2 days"... When i sent him my notices he called me a liar, his webdev has alot of experience and told him it should take 2-3 days...ffs

Contex: Working on a c++ frankenstein code (mixture of legacy and new stuff whith things depending on the client using it)

User Story: Migration from oracle to SQLite for half of the DB data

Summoner: One client wants to keep using legacy for now, therefore we need an strategy chooser templated singleton...

Satan 666 = Singletons + Static methods + Different compilation units

Result: 3/4 of the files of the full backend being modified for the migration.

Conclusion: When will be loaded on production company will probably lose many clients due to unspected bugs everywhere.

Insert potato here

team lead/senior telling you that you're probably going to break prod and have to patch it for the next couple of weeks when working on one of the first migration epics on legacy monolith, but we'll get good data from it doesn't make it any less terrifying

I don't know why they made so many algorithms, data structures and big O questions during interview, when all they wanted me to do was to maintain some legacy, tight coupled, spaghetti code with no architecture, documentation, tests nor any kind of engineering behind :/

So for those of you keeping track, I've become a bit of a data munger of late, something that is both interesting and somewhat frustrating.

I work with a variety of enterprise data sources. Those of you who have done enterprise work will know what I mean. Forget lovely Web APIs with proper authentication and JSON fed by well-known open source libraries. No, I've got the output from an AS/400 to deal with (For the youngsters amongst you, AS/400 is a 1980s IBM mainframe-ish operating system that oriiganlly ran on 48-bit computers). I've got EDIFACT to deal with (for the youngsters amongst you: EDIFACT is the 1980s precursor to XML. It's all cryptic codes, + delimited fields and ' delimited lines) and I've got legacy databases to massage into newer formats, all for what is laughably called my "data warehouse".

But of course, the one system that actually gives me serious problems is the most modern one. It's web-based, on internal servers. It's got all the late-naughties buzzowrds in web development, such as AJAX and JQuery. And it now has a "Web Service" interface at the request of the bosses, that I have to use.

The programmers of this system have based it on that very well-known database: Intersystems Caché. This is an Object Database, and doesn't have an SQL driver by default, so I'm basically required to use this "Web Service".

Let's put aside the poor security. I basically pass a hard-coded human readable string as password in a password field in the GET parameters. This is a step up from no security, to be fair, though not much.

It's the fact that the thing lies. All the files it spits out start with that fateful string: '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>' and it lies.

It's all UTF-8, which has made some of my parsers choke, when they're expecting latin-1.

But no, the real lie is the fact that IT IS NOT WELL-FORMED XML. Let alone Valid.

THERE IS NO ROOT ELEMENT!

So now, I have to waste my time writing a proxy for this "web service" that rewrites the XML encoding string on these files, and adds a root element, just so I can spit it at an XML parser. This means added infrastructure for my data munging, and more potential bugs introduced or points of failure.

Let's just say that the developers of this system don't really cope with people wanting to integrate with them. It's amazing that they manage to integrate with third parties at all...

Product Management thought of automating an entire legacy product so they funded undisclosed amount to program management who in turn hired >20 contract devs managed by architects and dev managers with zero functional or technical knowledge of product and who in turn went ahead automating the product in selenium, end result of which was an useless automation framework with lot of browser specific dependencies and whuch could run only on one setup environment and migrating test cases to another environment and running is almost impossible and tyrannical to configure. The automation test cases are highly disorganized with all generic setup, DB configurations and business case test data mixed up in same config files and which need to be rewriten every time ported from one environment to other.To add misery to my woes as a dev working in that product I was told to utilize that framework and enhance the quality of my code by writing inline automation Cases for the same. I am left speechless thoughtless and emotionless after that decision.

I love working on legacy products. You just need a good shower and possibly a therapist after.

- Sensitive data sent over the internet encrypted with DES (not even 3DES). Guess it doesn't matter that the key (singular, for the last decade) is basically 0123456789ABCDEF.

- Client databases with open default port, admin/admin superuser.

- Critical applications (potential for substantial property damage, maybe loss of life) with a single point of failure and without backup.

Suggestions, to slow down a bit with sales, so we have time to rewrite this steaming pile of crap are met with the excuse: be more pragmatist, this is standard industry practice.

Some of this shit can be fixed on my own time if my conscience nags too much, but others would require significant investment of time from multiple developers, which would slow down new business.

Guess the pay is ok, so that's something...

I'm currently between jobs and have a few rants about my previous job (naturally). In retrospect, it's somewhat therapeutic to range about the sheer brainfuckery that has taken place. Enjoy!

First, let me set the scene: legacy B2B web app made with LEMP stack and sencha ext.js 3 + 4 (don't ask) and a lot of madness. Let's call that app "Alpha".

Alpha is a self made CMS build for typical ERP stuff. Yes, a self made CMS: entities are containers, containers have types and fields and values. Like so many legacy PHP apps, it does not have a dedicated FE: the HTML is rendered on the server and then spewed out to the browser.

Easy right? Coding like it's 1999! But there was a twist: Because everything is basically a container, the HTML-templates are saved in the DB. Along with the nessary JS and the CSS. And the translation variables. Why? Because fuck you! That's why. Who needs a git history anyways.

For some reason, Alpha was kinda slow.

There was also an editor, that allowed you to modify templates (web, mail, pdf) on the fly in prod. Because templates contain repeating data (header/footer), one template could contain additional templates. Much confusion. You could change templates via migration (slow, boring) or just ctrl-c/ctrl-v that sucker (fast, much excitement).

Did I mention Alpha was slow?

On with the rant: e-mails! How do they work? Noone knows. How to send mails asynchronous in PHP? Witchcraft is the only possible answer to that riddle. Here is your enterprise™ solution:
1. create mail
2. insert mail into DB
3. WAIT UP TO 59 SECONDS FOR A FUCKING CRON TO SEND MAIL

Why? "Because that way, we can resend mails in case the network is down :)"

Same procedure for the SOAP-API (db-queue + cron). You read that right: all requests to various other systems are processed once a minute.

Alpha slow.

Alpha was only one of several systems. Imagine a bunch of monolithic php apps, interconnected via SOAP, REST and GraphQL like a godamn intergalactic orgy. Image having to debug that cluster fuck.

Let's say there is a bad request. These things happen. No biggie. Remember the db-queue? Let's try to send the bad request a second time! And a third time! Still no luck? How odd. Let's create a specific file in a specific directory: a LOCK-file. Now, "the db-queue is on hold and no request gets processed :)"

Golly gee thanks Alpha.

Anyhow, did you know that MySQL has a join limit of 61 tables?

Last year I was asked to optimize a code in our legacy portal (yet to be replaced with the new portal). The legacy system didn't have a design phase. Straight away went to development by whatever developer available at that time.
It was seriously fucked up.

So I went and had a look at the vanilla PHP code that served data for a datatable.
** I nearly fainted **

A query was done to get data from a table without any joins.
Then for loop to display those data.
Then inside for loop, for every single column that gets data from a related table there's a fucking query.
Eg: select * from users where.... to display username. Then again select * from users where..... to display user's email, then another query for his phone number. Then another query to get service providers name, then another to get their phone number.

I think the guy who did it wrote his first hello world app with a bunch of queries and sent it to production. No one bothered to check until 4 years later when it slowed down like a friggin snail.
I'm surprised it even survived that long.

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!

So I began at my first programming job as an intern and it was as bad as it gets but I kept going, thinking that this was normal. After my internship I continued to work full-time at the same company and was working on new functionality on their legacy product build in ASP Classic and their shitty inhouse front-end framework (which btw used eval to evaluate strings in so called queues). So I was assigned a task to create a module which needed some available data in the database. I was discussing my ideas with my supervisor and she didn't let me finish and began speaking on how I should get the data needed. My approach was much more clean and used only one request and hers used two. So I heard what she had to say and I wanted to finish what I was about to say before she interrupted me but she did it again. I go nervous but let her finish once again. After that she left me to work on my task and I did it the way thought was right (and it was). After she saw my approach she was furious because I didn't talk it over with her and she said that she don't think that we can work together if I continue to work like this. I felt how my head filled with blood but I kept calm. If I had opened my mouth I would surely get fired. But I didn't open my mouth and quit after one or two months. She was a real bitch that day...

Soo... Let me get this straight... My boss reeeeeeally wants me to reconfigure our database system to sync data between each of our 15 sites... Let me this about this...

Our database is an MS Access database originally written about 17 years ago. It was written as a standalone database that runs a unique instance for each of our sites.The person responsible for the database (still not the original developer) before I took over 6 years ago bragged about how they were "an 80s developer" (w...t...f!). Even with all of the fixes and additions (additions because... F&$#ing of course there are!) It's still basically held together by duct tape and spit.

Hmmm... Ok, still possible. What's the environment I'm working in... I have absolutely ZERO control of our workplace network... That's a whole other department. Due to the nature of the workplace (and it's sites) there is extreme limitation on network access.

Well... If I'm Reeeeeeally nice to the people in charge of the network, maaaaaybe they can give me access to a little server space.

A very long shot, but, doab.... Oh, the boss would really like this handled in the next couple months...

F$#k you! There is no way on God's (still) green earth that I... Alone... Can rewrite a legacy database... written across 4 or 5 different versions of FU$KING MS Access, and give 15 sites, with extremely limited networking, real time data sync in... Oh, a few months.

Now, I do not work with "computer people". I'm usually lucky when my coworkers remember their passwords (which, even if they don't, WHY tell ME! I don't run the network!)

And when I tell my boss basically what I just said... In a nice, pleasant way... They suggest I'm not giving the problem enough thought...

FU#K YOU IGNORANT ASS! Write me a ToDo list in MS Access (no, I'm not going to tell you where to start) in under an hour then, MAYBE, we can talk about... No... Just NO... Can't be done!

*Takes deep breath* so... Lovely weather we're having, right?

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...

Most unprofessional experience at work?

Check out my previous rants. With so many, it would be difficult to pick just one.

Not sure if I've told this one before. 'Caleb' was part of a team responsible for migrating financial data from a legacy (DOS-based) system to our new system.
Because of our elevated security (and the data being plain text) Caleb had access to the entire company's payroll (including VP salary, bonuses, etc).
Solidifying my belief that that salaries should be private between the employee and the employer, Caleb discovered he was making considerably less than his peers (even a few devs that he had seniority over), and the green monster 'Jealosly' took over his professionalism. Caleb decided to tell everyone making the same and less than him, the salaries of the other (higher paid) devs, managers and VPs.
Nobody understood at the time, but these folks started to behave erratically , like showing up late, making comments like "Why should I document that? Make 'money bags' over there do it", etc and so on.

Soon at review time, Caleb decided to use his newly discovered ammunition to 'barter' for a higher salary by telling the manager if he didn't make $$$, he would send an email to the entire company containing everyone's salary.

The manager fired Caleb on the spot and escorted him out the building (Caleb never had chance to follow thru with that threat)

When word got out about Caleb's firing (and everybody knew why), those other employees started showing up on time and stopped complaining about doing their job.

How do you get over the bad times? I keep having to work with shitty legacy systems that were written in perl and flash in the 90s, but my boss keeps telling me "No" on redoing some of the bigger stuff even though it is really needed. I mean, that is your goal here, right? Rebuilding this POS? FFS you still stored passwords in plain text twoo weeks ago! But no, you's rather dig around in Perl than upset some random user because his fucking interface looks different.

But then I also have to work with another system that I could redo in Cake/Laravel in two weeks (it's literally getting and writing data to one table, so two views and user auth), and the previous dev just... made a huge mess. I mean, why would you need to post data asynchronously when it's this one stupid form ? Just do a regular form submit? And the system is really not suitable for extending, because everything is in the database, EVERYTHING! Like, html form inputs? So to add a simple input to the template I have to create a new input type in the types table and then add that to the form structure table? Only to have the input checked by fucking regex? REGEX! Why? Seriously, this is not some high end CMS that needs this level of code reusability No. This is a simple fucking form.

And I can't get it to work. No documentation of course. No comments, either. All of this makes me feel like I'm just the shittiest dev ever. I feel dumb, and useless. Haven't turned on my private PC in weeks because I see no reason to work on any of my own stuff.

I used to have a job, working with Magento and Wordpress. And yeah, it was horrible, it was chaos, but it was fun and I was great at it. I bent that motherfucking system to fit my needs. People respected my opinion, they were convinced I could program this and that, and I proved them right. Did I make mistakes? Hell yeah. Did I give up? Fuck no!

But now, I just feel like I can't even write a simple fucking form any more. I'm just so close to giving up on development as a whole, even though I love it so much.

A "portal" built on Drupal 7. Started by someone who cannot do anything outside Drupal, and overseen by someone who believes JS to be "low level programming" (he literally said that).

What normally would be a table with 7 columns is instead 7 tables joined together. That goes for each data structure.

Each page, built in a separate module, either manually includes the same css files, or simply copy/pastes them.

Old, legacy modules have been hacked, and now depend on newer modules... Which, in turn, depend on the same old ones.

The theme contains huge, hardcoded parts of logic, so it can never be updated.

Worst part of it? It's only 3 years old. And there are people buying it as SaS. Already hitting bottlenecks at 2k users.

Long story ahead

Background:
I recently started a job in a smallish startup doing web development in a mostly js stack as an entry-junior engineer/dev. I’m the only person actively working on our internal tools as my Lead Engineer (the only other in house dev) is working on other stuff.

Now I was given a two week sprint to rebuild a portion of our legacy internal app from angular 1.2 with material-ui looking components with no psd’s or cut-outs of any kind to a React and bootstrap ui for the front end and convert our .net API routes into Node.js ones. I had to build the API routes, SQL queries (as there were plenty of changes and reiterations that I had to go through to get the exact data I needed to display), and front end. I worked from 9am until 11pm every day for those two weeks including weekends as our company has a huge show this upcoming week.

I finish up this past sunday and push to our staging environment. The UI is 5.5/10 as we’re changing all of our styling to bootstrap and I’m no ui expert. The api has tests and works flawlessly (tm).

So we go into code review and everything is working as expected until one tab that I made erred out and was written down as a “Needs to be fixed.”

This fix was just a null value handler that took three minutes and a push back to staging, but that wasnt before a stupendous amount of shit being flung my way for the ui not looking great and that one bug was a huge deal and that he couldnt believe it slipped through my fingers.

Honestly, I’m feeling really unmotivated to do anything else. I overworked myself for that only to be shit on for one mistake and my ui being lack-luster with no guides.

Am I being a baby about this or is this something to learn from?

We are moving from Oracle 10g to SQL Server 2019 because Oracle doesn't want to provide support to our legacy 10g database.

It doesn't much sense well anyways god bless us during data migration.

Oh one last thing, fuck business analyst team.

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 []?

So I made an update to my React Native app. I changed UI of a couple of screen, added a few animations here and there, refactored how my graphQL resolvers work in the backend(no breaking changes), changed how data gets loaded into the database etc.

It worked in dev so I figured hey let's deploy it. Today is(was because it's now 3am but more on that later) a national holiday so no one goes to work so no one will use my app so I have an entire day to deploy.

I started at 15:00(because i woke up at 13:00 lol). I tested the update once again in dev and proceeded to deploy it to prod. I merged backend to master, built docker images, did migrations on the db, restarted docker-compose with new images. And now for the app. I run ./gradlew assembleRelease and it starts complaining that react-native-gesture-handler is not installed. Ugh, rm -rf node_modules && yarn install. It worked. But now gradlew crashes and logs don't tell me anything. Google tells me to change a bunch of gradle settings but none of them work. Fast forward 5h, it's around 20:00 and I isolated the issue to, again, react-native-gesture-handler. They updated from 2.2.4 to 2.3.0 which didn't fucking compile. 2 more hours passed (now 22:00) and I got v2.3.1 working which fixed the problem in 2.3.0 but made my app crash on startup. YOUR FUCKING LIBRARY GETS 250K WEEKLY DOWNLOADS AND YOU DONT EVEN BOTHER CHECKING IF IT COMPILES IN PROD ON ANDROID?! WHAT THE FUCK software-mansion?

After I solved that, my app didn't crash. Now it threw an error "Type errors: Network Request Failed" every time I fetch my legacy REST API(older parts use rest and newer use graphql. I'll refactor that in the next update). I'll spare you the debugging hell i went through but another 5h passed. Its 3am. My config had misspelled url to prod but good for dev... I hate myself and even more so react-native-gesture-handler.

Spent all morning debugging legacy code that I need to migrate.

Most of the time is just waiting for it to load --pieces of data-- entire tables from the database and then filter out the records it doesn't want using some app logic.

WHAT SORT OF MONKEY WRITES CODE LIKE THIS? HOW WAS THIS EVEN ALLOWED INTO PRODUCTION...

I have to open Notepad to write down my chain of thoughts, steps, and things to check once the next breakpoints are hit so that I don't forget them.

So in theory I'm being paid all morning to sit around and do nothing.

That sounds great but I'm falling asleep... Shoulda worked from home...

What was I saying again...yea...

DON'T HIRE MONKEYS!!! THEY WRITE SHIT CODE THAT WASTES EVERYONE'S TIME EVEN AFTER THEY LEAVE...

I'm going to lunch now... Hopefully Notepad has enough into for me to remember what I was doing...

* break it into elementary steps, small enough to fit into your "estimation time unit", e.g. days or hours.
* estimate those steps for "developing at a leisurely pace" if nothing goes wrong.
* think about "what could go wrong" (list everything!) and adjust values accordingly.
* adjust total amount with experience values, like:
* times 1.2 for every manager
* times 1 to 4 based on which legacy projects i have to touch

and finally:
* multiply with `1+log(t/u,2)`, with `u` being the amount of useful data in the requirement description and `t` being the total amount of data in the requirement description
* sample: with our current "favourite" customer, about 90% of all tickets is garbage, so t/u = 100/10 = 10 => log(10,2) = 3.3 => multiply everything with 4.3

So there is this program with legacy code from 15 years ago the client is in love with. Every time we try to accomplish something it proves that the mf who wrote it was so lazy and incompetent that he should have never chosen this profession. Goto, one-two letter for type and variable names. Dude even wrote an ascii decoder as if he would be payed for lines of code. Today we found a code where a rows of data was misindexed by one (we incorrectly assumed that we could extract some data from it but the column we wanted to use was just there for decoration, it was not actually used). the calculations the system uses are replicated for each interface with duplicate lines of code so the same binary data can show different values because of the multipliers.

If I could I woukd go back in time and bang the guy's head to the desk emphasising each word like "You - should - quit - and - never - ever - write - code -again"

when you think you're done coding and can finally start writing...
So you guys have seen my Unreal Engine adventures. I have to use a plugin for it, on top of everything, to extract some data. I've been using this plugin since ages on another pc, but now I had to set it up from scratch since this is a new project, new models, etc.
There is a new version. If I use the new one, it will break the chain which is to follow.
The old version is so legacy that the guy who wrote it does not remember how to set it up.

After hours, and tons of hacks and outcommenting stuff (there is physics involved with which I do nothing), it finally starts doing something. Finally!
Although I'm slowly loosing my sanity in the process....
Even if it now records the data, I cannot say if this is good enough or if the poses are all wonky now.

And that is my masters thesis. Submission deadline is on monday. Ha.
Ironically, since the start of this thesis, I felt like this will either make me or break me. ;D So much fun... FK

Many months into the project, we discovered that the client doesn't have a REST API for the data we needed from their side available at all - it's a legacy SOAP service.

I somehow got our Node.JS backend to do SOAP calls and use the XML results.

I'm not sure if I should feel proud or dirty at this point.

Since the issue is within the legacy backend data, this brings us the great opportunity to solve and sanitize the data on the frontend and therefore killing the performance of the application! Sincerely, a manager that doesn't give a shit

Perhaps as a tip for the junior devs out there, here's what I learned about programming skills on the job:

You know those heavy classes back in college that taught you all about Data Structures? Some devs may argue that you just need to know how to code and you don't need to know fancy Data Structures or Big o notation theory, but in the real world we use them all the time, especially for important projects.

All those principles about Sets, (Linked) lists, map, filter, reduce, union, intersection, symmetric difference, Big O Notation... They matter and are used to solve problems. I used to think I could just coast by without being versed in them.. Soon, mathematics and Big o notation came back to bite me.

Three example projects I worked in where this mattered:
- Massive data collection and processing in legacy Java (clients want their data fast, so better think about the performance implications of CRUD into Collections)
- ReactJS (oh yes, maps and filters are used a lot...)
- Massive data collection in C# where data manipulation results are crucial (union, intersection, symmetric difference,...)
Overall: speed and quality mattered (better know your Big o notation or use a cheat sheet, though I prefer the first)
Yes, the approach can be optimized here, but often we're tied to client constraints, with some room if we're lucky.

I'm glad I learned this lesson. I would rather have skills in my head and in memory than having to look up things and try to understand them all the time.

Rebuilding a whole disintegrating legacy plain-PHP project from zero in my favourite framework alone with data importers and stuff in 6 weeks.
Gave me some dreamless nights, but it was a great adventure.

We received legacy project for support and fixing.. it had few issues:
1. There was a controller called MainController. This guy was the soul of the project 10k+ lines, heavily dependent on the data from the database.
2. We didnt get the data. Just the database structure (we couldnt run the app at all)
3. At the very end of that controller there was a "simple" eval($_SESSION['somevariable'])
4. We had no documentation and had to guess how it works...

Someone really had fun screwing up this project. Needless to say we got rid of it quickly. :)

I currently work on a legacy system for a company. The system is really old - and although I was hired as a programmer, my job is pretty much glorified data entry. To summarise, I get a bunch of requirements, which is literally just lots of data for each month on spreadsheets and I have to configure the system to make it work, which is basically just writing a whole bunch of SQL scripts.

It’s not quite as simple as that, because whoever wrote the system originally really wrote it backwards, and in fact, the analysts who create the spreadsheets actually spend a fair bit of time verifying my work because the process is so tedious that it’s easy to make a mistake.

As you can guess, it is pretty much the most boring job ever. However, it’s a full time job with decent pay, and I work remotely so I can stay home with my son.

So I’ve been doing it for about 18 months and in that time, I’ve basically figured out all the traps to the point where I’ve actually written a program which for the past 6 months has been just doing the whole thing for me. So what used to take the last guy like a month, now takes maybe 10 minutes to clean the spreadsheet and run it through the program.

Now the problem is, do I tell them? If I tell them, they will probably just take the program and get rid of me. This isn’t like a company with tons of IT work - they have a legacy system where they keep all their customer data since forever, and they just need someone to maintain it. At the same time, it doesn’t feel like I’m doing the right thing. I mean, right now, once I get the specs, I run it through my program - then every week or so, I tell them I’ve completed some part of it and get them to test it. I even insert a few bugs here and there to make it look like it’s been generated by a human.

There might be amendments to the spec and corresponding though email etc, but overall, I spend probably 1-2 hours per week on my job for which I am getting a full time wage.

I really enjoy the free time but would it be unethical to continue with this arrangement without mentioning anything? It’s not like I’m cheating the company. The company has never indicated they’re dissatisfied with my performance and in fact, are getting exactly what they want from employing me.

I have a ton.
This one is more about my own foolhardiness, but I also learned a ton and came out stronger & wiser.

when I started out as a dev (my very first job!) and had not learned to say no.
I was a novice way out of my playground.

Like lifting a full booking platform from legacy php to Laravel & launching it like yesterday because it’s high season.
Didn’t know the full domain, so I just built something quite different in a week and shafted the existing db into it.

Obviously wasn’t feature complete or anything, so it resulted in maintaining legacy while building the new one and because it was already live and on different domains, we didn’t fully know which ppl went to, I had to every day painstakingly back port data from both platforms.
What I initially thought would take a few weeks that was launched in 3 days, spanned across 2 years plus one year refining and cleaning up my mess.

I need to make a legacy Java monstrosity asynchronous and came across a class which is currently making me cry blood.

It took our whole team 5 days to figure out how this thing works, including the weekend. At one place, It is adding an empty list, to another list.

The magic here is that if I remove the statement assigning data to the sub list, the data is still somehow being populated in the root list.

This clusterfuck somehow works in single threaded processing, but as soon as I make this multi threaded, all hell breaks loose.

Please send help!!

When you write an efficient piece of code and because the legacy database is too slow to return the data, you have to find a way to delay your processing instead of finding a way to speed up the database web service.

I think one of the hardest experiences as a junior is the oscillation from perceived competency to perceived incompetency.

I just spent the last 4 weeks putting together my first major UI set of components for a financial calculator. Uses Vue, Quasar, a lot of data transformation and reactive UI programming. I felt quite chuffed. Its pending merge.

Then my lead asked me to help him debug something on the flagship and legacy project; for educational purposes, not that he actually needs my help. The application is 100x the size of the one I have been working on, and monolithic. Orders of magnitude more complex.

The jump from a sense of “I might be able to do this” to “I could never do that” was almost soul destroying. Like looking back over the last ten meters you ran, realising that running is hard and you did it. Only to look ahead and realise there are easily 100 miles ahead of you.

How the fuck do you cope with that.

I hope people who store data in unstructured binary format without documenting what the the actual logic is have a separate room in hell.
I hate this legacy s***pile of visual basic code that has this abbreviated function names everywhere and the 'developer' (really should be name jack***) instead of documenting his custom solutions just thought out some custom data formats and wrote really long and bad code around it to transform and decode it. Clr sql makes it impossible to debug so wherever you are my dear predecessor I hipe you rot in hell

Inherited a legacy system from a developer and it's a freaking nightmare! The majority of the system uses timestamps and not record ID's to handle data. When the clocks change (daylight savings) none of the records can be seen in the system because the freaking timestamps don't match up!! Arrghh this is going to take me ages to fix!!

How do you diagnose speed issues?

I've been lumped with looking after a legacy app.

It connects to our ERP system to handle raising invoices etc. And in June is developed slowness, which we sort of fixed by making one section load later (the SQL was a horrible view in a view in a view).

We then upgraded our ERP software, and the SQL issues are resolved (had to upgrade SQL server etc at the same time) and now the legacy app is running really slowly.

I know that it is when it loops through a data set to set column values etc.

A particular project has 1900 time transactions and takes upto 2 minutes to load.

This part of the program hasn't been changed in over a year, and has only started running slowly since the upgrade.

Are there any good way I can investigate and diagnose exactly why it has suddenly started running slowly?

I have a small NUC-like machine in my home with an old external hdd connected to it. I use it to run my local gitlab, nextcloud and to test a few websites I build for the lolz.
If you too have a homelab, whether it's a single raspberry or an entire room full or racks, you know damn well that everything you have running locally as a web service keeps going until it doesn't, for whatever fucking reason. This time, it was the turn of my nextcloud.
The machine has arch linux running, I chose it since I already use it on my coding laptop and being a rolling release means I don't have to manually upgrade to a newer version, risking various fuck-ups and consequent screaming of profanity.
The downside is that arch is a bleeding-edge distro, so, despite being pretty good for what concerns security, as updates are pushed out some packages may still require legacy software to work as intended, since obviously not all developers for all packages can release simultaneously.
The problem was that php reached 8.2.x but nextcloud couldn't use anything beyond 8.1, so the highlighted solution was to download php-legacy, a package with a set of utilities which the cloud could use instead of mainline php.

Pretty easy, right? fuck my life, here we go.

I edited apache-httpd's configurations to link the new libraries, updated every reference in every virtual host that could possibly screw up the web server.

Done.

Then I went on and disabled the php-fpm mainline, creating a new systemd unit that would instead run the legacy executable and afterwards I edited nextcloud's additional configs so they use that instead.

Done, getting a bit dizzy, but I reboot everything and breathe.

At this point the migration should be complete, but wait, the server returns an error saying that the application is still trying to use php 8.2+...wait, what in the sysadmin Christ?

Back to nextcloud config, everything is set, everything else in every other fucking php-legacy and web server is fine, the old fpm service is disabled, I am confused, and why in the FUCKING FUCK is the new php-fpm unit failing to start at boot with "error 78/config - directory not found"? Hello? Am I being trolled by a shitty dual-core amazon fake NUC?
Maybe yes, cause it turns out that the unit was referencing a directory in the external hdd, which gets mounted at boot time after the unit itself starts, so nothing much, just a matter of tinkering with cron jobs, a reboot and at least this one is off my balls.

But why still isn't the server responding correctly? why? WHY?

After slamming my cock on the keyboard here and there scrolling back through all the config files I think to myself, hmmm, my gitlab is working flawlessly, well yeah, I didn't need to install the whole web stack, everything was nice and easy wrapped in a docker container...so why am I even here, why the fuck am I bothering with all this layered web-app bullshit, why don't I just run the up-to-date docker image that someone else has already set up for me, back up all the data and reupload them on the application?

Oh joy, you can't imagine, after 3...almost 4 hours of pure computer-touching the relief I had from seeing the blue web page with the "welcome to nextcloud" title.

Right now it's copying back all the files, and the external hdd is now linked to include the data folder.
Like really, everything was solved in two lines of bash.

I am still fuming, but at least I learned a valuable lesson, if you want a service up for yourself, implement it and deploy it as fucking easy straight-forward as you can, giving MAXIMUM priority to already fully-working options that are out there just waiting to be downloaded and used. I swing my scrotal sack on web-apps elegance as long as it's MY homelab in MY place.

Eat a fat dick php.

sudo pacman -Rns nextcloud
sudo systemctl disable --now php-fpm-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns php-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns $(sudo pacman -Qdtq)

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.

Weekend ruined supporting legacy and poorly designed services coupled with poor architecture.

But "no project bandwidth" to refactor said services.

5 hours of data loss should now hopefully inspire a backlog re-shuffle.

I've just joined a new company out of despair after several month out of jobs without being able to even get interviews.
I've been warned about the code being a bit behind with modern Android stack, they needed to migrate from rx to coroutine and compose is not a priority at the moment.
Fine with it, I like handling and planning migration, that's a nice challenge.
But if only that were the only problems !! Far from it, the code is a formidable mess, I've never seen so much amateurism... Most of it was written from the previous Lead Dev who stayed there for years and touched everything with their very bad practices.
I don't even know where to start honestly...
While the code is in Kotlin, it stink Java. Nothing wrong about Java, but if you code in kotlin, you need to understand what kotlin try to achieve. And that's not the case here. There is freaking nullable everywhere, for no reason at all, the data classes contains lot of var in their constructors, equals are override to compare only one or 2 params and no hashcode override with it.
Sealed class, what for ?! Let me just write a List<Pair<Enum, Any>> and cast your any depending on the enum !
Oh and you know what, let's cast everywhere, no check, and for once no null safe, there is enough nullable in the code !

What about the reactive part ? well let's recreate a kind of broken eventbus with rx ! Cause why not ?!
The viewmodel observable don't contain data, they just contain enum for the progress of the states we're checking.
In the viewmodel function we update that enum states and emit it to be observed and make the data available as a var for the view to pick it up when needed.
But why put the business logic in the viewmodel, let's put in the views, and grab and check the variable contain in the viewmodel whenever it fits.
Testing the business logic ? uh let me just test my variable initialisation in the viewmodel instead.
The vm, the views, make about 2000 lines, the test over 3000, and not a single test really test the business logic in it ! I've made big refactoring we're all the tests stayed green, while the function are full of side effects ! WTF ?!
Oh and what about that migration from rx to coroutine ? well better not break the existing code and continue writting like rx, everything is cold flow ! We just need to store a boolean saying if we already did our call to the data layer then we decide to start our flow or not.
As for the RecyclerView, having too many viewHolder is just so annoying, let's put all our different views in one, and hide what we don't need.
Keystore has been push on the repo, but it's private no ? So who cares ?!
And wait i'm not done ! Some of the main brick of the apps depends on library that hasn't been updated for years, and you know what... yes they were hosted on Jcenter and it's only now that they decide to do something about it, we we're warned about the sunset of jcenter 2 years ago !!!!
So what about compose ? What do you want with compose ?! there is no design system in that app obviously, so don't even think about it !
And there... among all of that mess, I'm supposed to do code review... how the fuck do you do a code review when all the code that is around stink ?!
And there is so much more but by now I'm afraid you're thinking i'm just pissing on the old code like everyone... but damn I guarantee, that's the worst code I've ever seen, and i've work on more than 15 app from small to big on different contract with a lot of legacy code, but nothing that bad !

* Canonical Data Models for Metrics and Reporting
* ETL, Table, and API designs to blend Legacy data into Cloud data via said Canonical Models
* Teaching n-Tier and Domain Driven Development models

Welcome to the Office of the CIO.

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.)

Long time no rant.

Spent the last two days trying to figure out why a legacy app that I adopted (was a surprise considering I'm a database developer not c#).

Long story short horrendous view causing issues retrieving data in an app that is slow enough as it is.

I may have suggested starting a proper product roadmap and using sprint's etc for managing development of said app. And the boss agreed, currently the process is someone asks for a feature and we drop everything and develop it so things get forgotten/pushed to the back of the queue.

So to cut to the chase, can anyone suggest any places I can read up about managing this properly?

SWIFT 3 sucks! SUCKS I TELL YOU! swift 3 changes the NSError class to its own Error class, now the categories (i.e the extensions) that I have added to the NSError class (like convenience inits and NSDictionary map to my own variables) are ALL LOST !!! MORE THAN 100 LINES OF CODE LOST!! because of this piece of shit mutation of the DATA TYPE ITSELF!!! when objective C code is used in Swift (using the mix-match technique) DONT UPGRADE TO swift 3.0 GUYS DONT DO IT!!! especially if you have legacy code in your project !!

I've been asked to release a project which has been written by someone else, then rewritten by another developer, and both have left the company.

I can't release it yet because there is an inconsistent bug throwing some values out.

We've got it running side by side with an older legacy system which it's going to replace. Before the 2nd developer left they added some logging to our live system to record both values so that they could be monitored to make sure there was no inconsistency.

There are some inconsistencies... however, when I run the same data through the new system and the legacy system in a test environment they both come out correct.

FML

I've considered quitting...

Working on a legacy PHP project that every single query inserts user-provided data without any sanitization, aka SQL injection ahoy! Also no framework.

Oh let the rant time begin…

So previous post I mentioned about this dev who has resigned and how I was going to see about a Snr. position.

Management is now scrambling to figure out what to do as this dev managed all the migration to AWS etc, I know servers but haven’t got too much familiarity with AWS.

Anyways so I finally get a 1:1 with my new line manager. I ask about the position and he says they don’t know what there going to do yet. Hire a new dev in India to offset and with the same knowledge even though the guy leaving is in the U.K. Bad idea as the servers are in the U.K. so if we get downtime or the server crashes we have no one in the U.K. to reset or access to the servers. India are very cagey who gets access which is annoying to say the least even though us (three devs) in the U.K. are the principal engineering team so there looking at all options.

Anyways we have a back and fourth, we discuss some of the plans for the app, some of which we are nowhere near ready to even conceptualise as the app in its current state sucks, (ruby 2.2.6 and rails 5 but not really). Needs major refactoring and rewrite, one thing they want to do is multi tendency which again given the state is laughable.

So, as my manager is speaking my head is screaming being like “this is just going to be a massive disaster”. Then we go onto that he’s seeing what everyone’s strengths are etc. And then we get onto the upgrade and that he wants me to work on it.

Yes.. the upgrade I’ve been trying to do for the past 4+ months but I keep getting told to stop and getting pushed backed.

I’ve been told we have devOps looking into restructuring the app, not possible as how the app is written, we have India trying to multi tenant again disaster incoming as they’ll end up rushing it. Legal are going to have a field day. Every time I say the issues are the fundamentals with the app, here’s how we can sort it. In one ear out the other basically there patching the ship even though it’s still leaking.

I have so many ideas, and things I can do to improve the app and get it back to not only working order, fix the performance issues, data issues and everything else. Brick wall.

So rants ensue where I basically say I would love to do the upgrade but management gives me no time in the roadmap (we have no say in planning). At this point I’m just speaking to a brick wall.

After the meeting I have a chat with the BAs, we all have the same issues so honestly it sucks we end up ranting to each other for an hour.

I’m being under-utilised, being told do this, do that even though I’ve had two stabs but told to stop and pushed back, I know what benefits I can bring to the app with a refactoring, ideas and how to properly lead the team because honestly we’re working on an old legacy app, and management are clueless and there priorities are all wrong, the company is getting frustrated and it’s a sinking ship. They would rather patch issues without solving them and everything I say goes in one ear and out the other.

Frustrating is not the word.

After almost 3 years of professional experience I’d like to specialize more in something but I struggle to because I enjoy almost every aspect of IT: I find front-end really fun, I find very rewarding to build good user experiences and I’m excited for what WASM may bring on the table but I even like to work on the back end on both: legacy monoliths and modern micro services, I love to refactor clunky programs full of “cargo cult” code and redundancies put by people who doesn’t understand the framework they’re using and to make them shine. I’m even good at UNIX/Linux scripting and with Docker (often colleagues asks me advice on these topics) so I’m really tempted to upgrade my knowledge by learning K9S and reading the 1000+ pages of Unix Power Tools to get into operations/DevOps especially considering which the field is the least likely to be overrun by cheap developers coming from a 3 months boot camp.
On top of that I’ve got even into more theoretical topics: I’m following a course on algorithms and data structures in C and in future I want to learn the basics of AI for a personal project but these things aren’t much about employment but personal culture.
Have you got any advice for this disoriented young man?

Oh yeah ... Java is cool in an utterly sick way even that i can't seem to find a non-retarded built-in stack data structure
Call me a racist, but java.util.Stack has a removeIf() method in case you want to remove odd numbers:

import java.util.Stack;

public class App {
public static void main(String[] args) {
int arr[] = { 2, 4, 7, 11, 13, 16, 19 };
Stack<Integer> s = new Stack<Integer>();
for (int i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {
s.push(arr[i]);
}
s.removeIf((n) -> (n % 2 == 1));
System.out.println(s); // [2, 4, 16]
}
}

Stop using java.util.Stack they said, a legacy class they said, instead i should use java.util.ArrayDeque, but frankly i can still keep up being racist (in a reversed manner):

import java.util.ArrayDeque;
import java.util.Deque;

public class App {
public static void main(String[] args) {
int arr[] = { 2, 4, 7, 11, 13, 16, 19 };
Deque<Integer> s = new ArrayDeque<Integer>();
for (int i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {
s.push(arr[i]);
}
s.removeIf((n) -> (n % 2 == 1));
System.out.println(s); // [16, 4, 2]
}
}

The fact that you can iterate through java.util.Stack is amazing, but the ability to insert element in a specified index:

import java.util.Stack;

public class App {
public static void main(String[] args) {
int arr[] = { 2, 4, 7, 11, 13, 16, 19 };
Stack<Integer> s = new Stack<Integer>();
for (int i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {
s.push(arr[i]);
}
s.add(2, 218);
System.out.println(s); // [2, 4, 218, 7, 11, 13, 16, 19]
}
}

That's what happens when you inherit java.util.Vector, which is only done a BRAIN OVEN person, a very brain oven even that it will revert to retarded

If you thought about using this type of bullshit in Java get yourself prepared to beat the disk for hours when you accidentally call java.util.Stack<T>.add(int index, T element) instead of java.util.Stack<T>.push(T element), you will probably end up breaking the disk or your hand, but not solving the issue

WHY THE F*** CAN'T WE HAVE A WORKING NORMAL STACK ?

I love and hate javascript. I set out to do a fully ajax/state driven form interface that operates with multiple interdependent data objects which all extend a base class.

React/Angular may have been a better call but I just didn't have time so I needed to rapid prototype in jquery /vanilla JS.

I'm in the midst of learning and refactoring all the ajax calls to promises and then to async/await, so it's a huge learning experience...

Meanwhile I've got to build objects to represent the data on the backend which is all legacy OScommerce/PHP

Hell of a ride.