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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   

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

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

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.

Working on a database priorly designed and maintained by some private agency.

The fuck I'm dealing with!

Boolean values stored as 'TRUE'/'FALSE'. It's varchar, my dudes.

There are no FK relations. Just the values of IDs in a column.

There are no indexes, all on just the PKs, nothing else. Nothing.

Null, what's that? I'm dealing with 'N/A', my dudes.

Unique key, what's that? The table which stores users has all the fields nullable. Email is not unique ( even though that's the required behaviour).

ALL the numeric values are stored as varchar. Varchar, my dudes. Varchar. '1', '1.1'

And finally, the good ole, 1 table to rule them all. Normalisation, fuck that.

And what's the root cause of all this? My PM used to hand them Excel sheets she maintains on her local system. FTW. I don't have a enough explanations.

dear api author at my company pt. 2:

If you're gonna create an api method that takes some arguments.

And one of those arguments is an array.

THEN MAKE THE FUCKING ARGUMENT'S NAME PLURAL YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT.

REPEAT WITH ME, MOTHERFUCKER.
ARRAY, PLURAL, NON-ARRAY, SINGULAR.

I need to pass a shitload of filters for the data for this table, and for every suckin fuckin filter I need to singularize this shit. Thank god for es6.

I know this sounds like nitpick, but I swear to fucking alpha omega this guy is inconsistent as fuck.

Every time it feels like he makes up a new rule.

Sometimes I need to send arrays of ids, other times arrays of objects with an id property on each.

He uses synonyms too, sometimes it's remove, other times erase.

PICK ONE MOTHERFUCKER.

If you can't do the basic things well, then what is to expect of more advanced stuff?

Naming conventions you fucking idiot, follow them. It's programming 101.

You're already sending them as plural in the fucking response. Why change them for the request?

And that's just style, conventions.

This idiot asshole also RARELY DOES ANY FUCKING CHECK ON THE ARGUMENTS.

"Oh, you sent a required argument as null? 500"

We get exceptions on sentry UP THE ASS thanks to this useless bone container.

YOU'RE SEEING THE EXCEPTIONS TOO!!!!! 500'S ARE BUGS YOU NEED TO FIX, YOU CUMCHUGGER

And sometimes he does send 400, you know what the messages usually are?
"Validation failed".

WHYYYYYY YOU GODDAMN APATHETIC TASTELESS FUCK???
WHAT EXACTLY CAUSED THE FUCKING VALIDATION TO FAIL????

EXCEPTIONS HAPPEN AND THANKS TO YOU I HAVE NO IDEA WHY.

The worst of all... the worst of fucking all is that everytime I make a suggestion to change shit, every time, you act like you care.
You act like the api is the way it is because you designed it in a calculated manner.

MOTHERFUCKER. IF A USER HAS ONLY PRODUCT A, THEN HE SHOULDN'T BE ABLE TO ACCESS DATA FOR PRODUCT B. IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO JUST RESTRICT SHIT WITH ADMIN ROLES. IDIOT!!!!!

This is the work of someone who has no passion for programming.

I’m trying to add digit separators to a few amount fields. There’s actually three tickets to do this in various places, and I’m working on the last of them.

I had a nightmare debugging session earlier where literally everything would 404 unless I navigated through the site in a very roundabout way. I never did figure out the cause, but I found a viable workaround. Basically: the house doesn’t exist if you use the front door, but it’s fine if you go through the garden gate, around the back, and crawl in through the side window. After hours of debugging I eventually discovered that if I unlocked the front door with a different key, everything was fine… but nobody else has this problem?

Whatever.
Onto the problem at hand!

I’m trying to add digit separators to some values. I found a way to navigate to the page in question (more difficult than it sounds), and … I don’t know what view is rendering the page. Or what controller. Or how it generates its text.

The URL is encrypted, so I get no clues there. (Which was lead dev’s solution to having scrapeable IDs instead of just, you know, fixing them). The encryption also happens in middleware, so it’s a nightmare to work through. And it’s by the lead dev, so the code is fucking atrocious.

The view… could be one of many, and I don’t even know where they are. Or what layout. Or what partials go into building it.

All of the text on the page are “resources” — think named translations that support plus nested macros. I don’t know their names, and the bits of text I can search for are used fucking everywhere. “Confirmation number” (the most unique of them) turns up 79 matches. “Fee” showed up in 8310 places before my editor gave up looking. Really.

The table displaying the data, which is what I actually care about, isn’t built in JS or markup, but is likely a resource that goes through heavy processing. It gets generated in a controller somewhere (I don’t know the resource name so I can’t find it), and passed through several layers of “dynamic form” abstraction, eventually turned into markup, and rendered as a partial template. At least, that’s how it worked in the previous ticket. I found a resource that looks right, and there’s only the one. I found the nested macros it uses for the amount and total, and added the separators there… only to find that it doesn’t work.

Fucking dead end.

And i have absolutely nothing else to go on.

Page title? “Show”
URL? /~LiolV8N8KrIgaozEgLv93s…
Text? All from macros with unknown names. Can’t really search for it without considerable effort.
Table? Doesn’t work.
Text in the table? doesn’t turn up anything new.
Legal agreement? There are multiple, used in many places, generates them dynamically via (of course) resources, and even looking through the method usages, doesn’t narrow it down very much.

Just.
What the fuck?
Why does this need to be so fucking complicated?

And what genius decided “$100000.00” doesn’t need separators? Right, the lot of them because separators aren’t used ANYWHERE but in code I authored. Like, really? This is fintech. You’d think they would be ubiquitous.

And the sheer amount of abstraction?
Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.

OMFG I don't even know where to start..
Probably should start with last week (as this is the first time I had to deal with this problem directly)..

Also please note that all packages, procedure/function names, tables etc have fictional names, so every similarity between this story and reality is just a coincidence!!

Here it goes..

Lat week we implemented a new feature for the customer on production, everything was working fine.. After a day or two, the customer notices the audit logs are not complete aka missing user_id or have the wrong user_id inserted.
Hm.. ok.. I check logs (disk + database).. WTF, parameters are being sent in as they should, meaning they are there, so no idea what is with the missing ids.

OK, logs look fine, but I notice user_id have some weird values (I already memorized most frequent users and their ids). So I go check what is happening in the code, as the procedures/functions are called ok.

Wow, boy was I surprised.. many many times..
In the code, we actually check for user in this apps db or in case of using SSO (which we were) in the main db schema..
The user gets returned & logged ok, but that is it. Used only for authentication. When sending stuff to the db to log, old user Id is used, meaning that ofc userid was missing or wrong.

Anyhow, I fix that crap, take care of some other audit logs, so that proper user id was sent in. Test locally, cool. Works. Update customer's test servers. Works. Cool..

I still notice something off.. even though I fixed the audit_dbtable_2, audit_dbtable_1 still doesn't show proper user ids.. This was last week. I left it as is, as I had more urgent tasks waiting for me..

Anyhow, now it came the time for this fuckup to be fixed. Ok, I think to myself I can do this with a bit more hacking, but it leaves the original database and all other apps as is, so they won't break.
I crate another pck for api alone copy the calls, add user_id as param and from that on, I call other standard functions like usual, just leave out the user_id I am now explicitly sending with every call.
Ok this might work.

I prepare package, add user_id param to the calls.. great, time to test this code and my knowledge..

I made changes for api to incude the current user id (+ log it in the disk logs + audit_dbtable_1), test it, and check db..
Disk logs fine, debugging fine (user_id has proper value) but audit_dbtable_1 still userid = 0.

WTF?! I go check the code, where I forgot to include user id.. noup, it's all there. OK, I go check the logging, maybe I fucked up some parameters on db level. Nope, user is there in the friggin description ON THE SAME FUCKING TABLE!!
Just not in the column user_id...

WTF..Ok, cig break to let me think..

I come back and check the original auditing procedure on the db.. It is usually used/called with null as the user id. OK, I have replaced those with actual user ids I sent in the procedures/functions. Recheck every call!! TWICE!! Great.. no fuckups. Let's test it again!
OFC nothing changes, value in the db is still 0. WTF?! HOW!?

So I open the auditing pck, to look the insides of that bloody procedure.. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!
Instead of logging the p_user_sth_sth that is sent to that procedure, it just inserts the variable declared in the main package..
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?! Did the 'new guy' made changes to this because he couldn't figure out what is wrong?! Nope, not him. I asked the CEO if he knows anything.. Noup.. I checked all customers dbs (different customers).. ALL HAD THIS HARDOCED IN!!! FORM THE FREAKING YEAR 2016!!! O.o

Unfuckin believable.. How did this ever work?!

Looks like at the begining, someone tried to implement this, but gave up mid implementation.. Decided it is enough to log current user id into BLABLA variable on some pck..
Which might have been ok 10+ years ago, but not today, not when you use connection pooling.. FFS!!

So yeah, I found easter eggs from years ago.. Almost went crazy when trying to figure out where I fucked this up. It was such a plan, simple, straight-forward solution to auditing..

If only the original procedure was working as it should.. bloddy hell!!

The ticket system blokes - episode 3

So we always had and have very awful performance with our ticket system. You can't get anything to load in under ~4s normally. Now since it has gotten worse over the last weeks i decided to set aside a few hours to closely watch our SQL server.
After i identified a culprit that was hogging the CPU almost every 2 minutes i looked at other long running queries in the server and found out where exactly the 4s come from.

6 tables from various DBs. Sure, no problem.

Left Outer Join. Sure, why not.

Querying every fucking column in every fucking table explicitly adding up to a whopping 160 columns which they need not even 10% of. We're talking about session IDs, passwords, stock count, IBANs and all that stuff to show the work done on a ticket. Absolutely not.

So i extracted the query and reduced it to the stuff we need and the execution time went from 4 seconds to almost instant.

The funny thing is that their idea of performance optimization is throwing LIMIT around everywhere to get these monstrous queries under control.

So in the next few days I'll have an appointment with their lead programmer. I'm looking forwards to it.

So out of curiosity: does anyone know an SQL builder or toolset that does shit like
SELECT X AS [t0_c0],
SELECT Y AS [t0_c1],
SELECT Z AS [t1_c0],
and so on? I'd like to know how they got to this point.

So here I am trying to understand the database schema in order to write a REST interface. Then I find that one of the tables contains an id and a name columns but the name is Integer not a string!
I contacted the developer who gladly explained that it was easier for them to store the ids in the database but the actual names strings were hard coded in the source files so they can handle translations!

Allright, so now I have to extend a brand new application, released to LIVE just weeks ago by devs at out client's company. This application is advertised as very well structured, easy to work on, µservices-based masterpiece.

Well either I lack a loooot of xp to understand the "µservices", "easy to work on" and "well structured" parts in this app or I'm really underpaid to deal with all of this...

- part of business logic is implemented in controllers. Good luck reusing it w/o bringing up all the mappings...
- magic numbers every-fucking-where... I tried adding some constants to make it at least a tiny bit more configurable... I was yelled at by the lead dev of the app for this later.
- crud-only subservices (wrapped by facade-like services, but still.. CRUD (sub)services? Then what's a repository for...?). As a result devs didn't have a place where they could write business logic. So business logic is now in: controllers (also responsible for mapping), helpers (also application layer; used by controllers; using services).
- no transactions wrapping several actions, like removing item from CURRENT table first and then recreating it in HISTORY table. No rollback/recovery mechanism in service layers if things go South.
- no clean-code. One can easily find lines (streams) 400+ cols long.
- no encapsulation. Object fields are accessed directly
- Controllers, once get result from Services (i.e. Facade), must have a tree of: if (result instanceof SomeService.SomeSubservice1.Item1) {...} else if (result instanceof SomeService.SomeSubservice2.Item4) {...} etc. to build a proper DTO. IMO this is not a way to make abstraction - application should NOT know services' internals.
- µservices use different tables (hats off for this one!) but their records must have the same IDs. E.g. if I order a burger and coke - there are 2 order items in my order #442. When I make a payment I create an invoice which must have an id #442. And I'm talking about data layer, not service or application (dto)! Shouldn't µservices be loosely coupled and be able to serve independently...? What happens if I reuse InvoiceµService in some other app?

What are your thoughts?

Way too long story short: Needed to figure out how to use jQuery to update a table that had no classes or IDs to help you tell what's inside it. Worked out a looping structure to read the contents of the cell with the dependent data in each row, and then update the cell that needed changing depending on the value of the first cell.

Minified the solution and dropped it into the console. Worked exactly right on the first try.

(tldr: are foriegn keys good/bad? Can you give a simple example of a situation where foriegn keys were the only and/or best solution?)

i have been recently trying to make some apps and their databases , so i decided to give a deeper look to sql and its queries.

I am a little confused and wanted to know more about foreign keys , joins and this particular db designing technique i use.

Can anyone explain me about them in a simpler way?
Firstly i wanted to show you this not much unheard tecnique of making relations that i find very useful( i guess its called toxi technique) :
In this , we use an extra table for joining 2 tables . For eg, if we have a table of questions and we have a table of tags then we should also have a table of relation called relation which will be mapping the the tags with questions through their primary IDs this way we can search all the questions by using tag name and we can also show multiple tags for a question just like stackoverflow does.

Now am not sure which could be a possibile situation when i need a foriegn key. In this particular example, both questions and tags are joined via what i say as "soft link" and this makes it very scalable and both easy to add both questions and new tags.

From what i learned about foriegn keys, it marks a mandatory one directional relation between 2 tables (or as i say "hard a to b" link)
Firstly i don't understand how i could use foriegn key to map multiple tags with a question. Does that mean it will always going to make a 1to1 relationship between 2 tables( i have yet to understand what 11 1mant or many many relations arr, not sure if my terminology is correct)

Secondly it poses super difficulty and differences in logics for adding either a tag or question, don't you think?
Like one table (say question) is having a foreign key of tags ID then the the questions table is completely independent of tag entries.

Its insertion/updation/deletion/creation of entries doesn't affect the tags table. but for tag table we cannot modify a particular tag or delete a tag without making without causing harm to its associated question entries.
if we have to delete a particular tag then we have to delete all its associated questions with that this means this is rather a bad thing to use for making tables isn't it?

I m just so confused regarding foriegn keys , joins and this toxi approach. Maybe my example of stack overflow tag/questions is wrong wrt to foreign key. But then i would like to know an example where it is useful