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Search - "php madness"
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The gift that keeps on giving... the Custom CMS Of Doom™
I've finally seen enough evidence why PHP has such a bad reputation to the point where even recruiters recommended me to remove my years of PHP experience from the CV.
The completely custom CMS written by company <redacted>'s CEO and his slaves features the following:
- Open for SQL injection attacks
- Remote shell command execution through URL query params
- Page-specific strings in most core PHP files
- Constructors containing hundreds of lines of code (mostly used to initialize the hundreds of properties
- Class methods containing more than 1000 lines of code
- Completely free of namespaces or package managers (uber elite programmers use only the root namespace)
- Random includes in any place imaginable
- Methods containing 1 line: the include of the file which contains the method body
- SQL queries in literally every source file
- The entrypoint script is in the webroot folder where all the code resides
- Access to sensitive folders is "restricted" by robots.txt 🤣🤣🤣🤣
- The CMS has its own crawler which runs by CRONjob and requests ALL HTML links (yes, full content, including videos!) to fill a database of keywords (I found out because the server traffic was >500 GB/month for this small website)
- Hundreds of config settings are literally defined by "define(...)"
- LESS is transpiled into CSS by PHP on requests
- .......
I could go on, but yes, I've seen it all now.12 -
New job surprise: I will inherit a 900k lines of php code from a contractor dev shop. It is the company erp web app.
It has no version control, tests, architecture or configuration management of any kind.
There are just 1800 bug ridden files with almost no comments in a directory with lots of code duplication.
Also just learned that the contractor was paid a lot monthly for over 2 years for this monster.
I will need a raise quickly. At least management understands that I will need a couple of months to get a semblance of order in this madness.
And to you contractor I have your address and i'll try to restraint myself from vandalizing your house but I can't make any promises.
And fellow developers send help or beers or come and join me to teach this bastard a lesson.5 -
I used to think decrappifying my own CSS was hard... trying to help someone else is a whole other monster.
PHP, JS all have some method to their madness but CSS: “oh you center aligned your heading? Well guess everything else needs to be pushed wherever the fuck I feel like on the page” -
Just for the record, I come from creating audio programs in simple c++ and have some experience in bash and some notions of functional languages (I love them so much)
I've been learning about web development for around a year and a half and omg wtf is going on.
Looking at the history of web development you see a metric ton of frameworks going in and out, each and every one of them based on js which is... a shittyl language imho and each and every one of them they feel like their own unique language. It seems like the explosion of frameworks and libraries are a try to fix the stuff that js can't do well on its own bc it's... honestly it's shit.
nodeJS was a terrible idea.
JS makes sense to me to make simple webapps but omg as the project scale you end up with a metric ton of just madness and that seems to be the trend rn.
I'm learning react and wow man, it does things good but it can't escape the monster that it was built upon, it takes a useEffect to make everything explode.
TS makes something similar, it severly improves JS by providing a type system, which honestly was very much needed as the weak typing of JS is misused constantly or you are expected to do stuff with JS that is better suited for a strongly typed language, it's useful for some stuff but having a strongly type system with how websites are built nowadays is just common sense.
I'd be learning react and its intricacies happily if it weren't for the imminent threat of another framework taking its place and being the new thing that you have to use in order to have a job and react becoming obsolete in no time. I don't like PHP at all but I'd very much prefer to code just in it to this madness.
Basically: JS is broken, there are new frameworks popping up every day replacing each other to fix its brokenness and they feel like completely different languages, you get the feeling that you are constantly in a boat that is about to sink bc we are all using an unstable base for building websites.
I don't think I'm going to get a job by using clojurescript or elm (this last one I'd say it's still not mature enough) even if I'd loved to, instead I have to learn all the times that the virtual DOM of react is rerendered.
Phew, seriously, I'm learning Rust which is considered a hard language but at least you understand its logic, it feels like a tool that is worth investing time into and something that it's going to have its usage even if carbon or some alternative is released + it's not based on a shitty language.
I'm overwhelmed, sorry for the rant, I'm trying to make an app using tauri bc I love rust and wanted to learn react but man, it's hard, and it feels like it's going to disappear tomorrow, I've never experienced so much stress while learning a programming language/framework, everything feels broken in some way or another.6 -
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?3 -
My currently project. A migration of a project written 5 years ago in Java and PHP, to bash. I want to learn more about this language, the various peculiarities and also take the opportunity for refinements. I'm crazy I know, but what is life without a little bit of madness?27
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Background: We switched from just simple old PHP and JS using notepad++ to PHPStorm and its infinite configurables, Symfony 4, Twig, Composer, Doctrine, Yarn, NPM, Bootstrap, ( thank the stars we didn't try to add Docker in with all this ), any other junk I'm missing here? Then upgraded to Symfony 5.
Symfony's autowiring: madness behind the curtains. I get frustrated about when and where I can just magically inject these dependencies or use config variables, you know, like the ones you define in service.yaml. Hmmm, "service".yaml. In a controller you can say getParameter() but in a service you have to inject the parameter, FROM THE "SERVICE".yaml!!! Autowiring drives me nuts. Ok, so we can supply dependencies using the constructor, that's great! Within a controller you never have to instantiate the object you're passing to the constructor (autowiring handles that). That's cool, weird when we you try to trace it for the first few times, but nice I guess. Feels like half-assin' it. What bugs me here is that it only works in controllers... I guess out of the box.. i'm not even sure. To get that feature to work for services you have to make some yaml edits. Right?Maybe? Some of the Symfony tutorials have you code up some junk then trash it. Change config then wipe that out and do X instead... so I have no idea what "out of the box" for Symfony really is.
Found this cool article that describes my frustrations in better terms and seems like a good resource to learn about autowiring. I need to continue my yaml wizardry classes. https://alanstorm.com/symfony-autow...
.....And on to YAMLs, or CSS, or JS or any other friggin' change you make to a file anywhere... Make a change, reload page, nothing... nope you have to do some hidden cheat combo of yarn dostuff -> cache:clear -> cache:warmup -> cache:cache:the:cache ... I really really hate this crap. Maybe I'm too old school for all this junk. It was simple with pure PHP. Edit code, push file, reload page, and oh look it changed! Done. So happy! Ok, Ok. Occasionally the js or css might get cached by the browser and you have to ctrl/f5 or Shift/f5 .. one of those. With this framework there's just so much more that you have to remember to do get some new feature of your site loaded.
Now, I totally get wanting to use some type of entity framework, but I feel like my entire world turned backwards. Designing tables using something like MySQL Workbench made sense. I can see all the columns and datatypes right there as i'm building them. From what I've experienced now with Symfony/Doctrine is you have to make and entity, get a shit-ton of question lobbed at you and if it's a relation field you have to really have a clear idea of the cardinality up front. Then we migrate that to the database. Carefully read through the SQL if you really really just want to use migrations:migrate in Prod. That alter table could cost you some some downtime if your table is large.
Some days man....