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.

You might call it a bug, but I think it's more of an unintended easteregg.

There was a sales manager who was raked with overseeing me and another dev finish a last minute request project. He said at one point to the other dev that he was mad at developers because we understood something that he would never understand.

This same manager would often sit in on estimation meetings and constantly say that we were estimating too high and needed to come up with faster solutions. When we would offer him with caveats of possible technical debt or unintended side-effects/performance issues, he'd want us to go with that solution. He would then complain that we were always wanting to work on technical debt and that our application was slow. He would also ask for very high level estimates for large, unscoped features/apps without any meaningful level of detail, then hold us to the high-level estimated date even after revealing additional features previously unmentioned.

We learned to never compromise on the right solution and to push back hard on dates without proper scoping. They didn't learn, so I and most of the good devs left.

Observation

Usually happens when hitting some heavy development after waking up to an idea at 5am and rushing in to the office to make it happen. Then you write for hours straight refilling some coffee once in a while.

At some point you start finding other people at the coffee station and the smalltalk starts. For some reason I can't turn my brain into social mode. Someone asks me stuff like "How was your weekend?" And the answer can be anything between "I like turtles" and some totally uninhibited and unintended truth in the TIM category.

Flow is strong but it totally fucks up my social capabilities. It also makes me happy =D

I just saw an ad by a viral marketing agency thisventviral.net that sell a 16GB USB stick with an os image they call Xtra-PC for 29,60.
I immediately noticed that it seemes to be a simple USB boot stick with a Linux distro with a Windows like ui and OpenOffice and other software pre installed.
They guy took out his CD drive bay an claimed that he removed the hard disk. While odd his clames about faster speeds are obviously true because microshaft windows and office are bloated pieces of shit.

So this leaves me in the odd position that a viral marketing scam selling you over priced USB sticks and an image you probably could find for free, also makes people adopt Linux instead of the bloated shit. And that with people that won't notice any of the downsides of using Linux.

Wired position, should I hate them or should I commend them for theire unintended efforts spreading Linux desktops?

What's the most complex programming task you ever had to solve? Or: A "hack"* of a framework/API you came up with to make something work?

*undocumented or unintended use

I explained last week in great detail to a new team member of a dev team (yeah hire or fire part 2) why it is an extremely bad idea to do proactive error handling somewhere down in the stack...

Example
Controller -> Business/Application Logic -> Infrastructure Layer

(shortened)

Now in the infrastructure layer we have a cache that caches an http rest call to another service.

One should not implement retry or some other proactive error handling down in the cache / infra stack, instead propagate the error to the upper layer(s) like application / business logic.
Let them decide what's the course of action, so ...
1) no error is swallowed
2) no unintended side effects like latency spikes / hickups due to retries or similar techniques happens
3) one can actually understand what the services do - behaviour should either be configured explicitly or passed down as a programmed choice from the upper layer... Not randomly implemented in some services.

The explanation was long and I thought ... Well let's call the recruit like the Gremlin he is... Gizmo got the message.

Today Gizmo presented a new solution.

The solution was to log and swallow all exceptions and just return null everywhere.

Yay... Gizmo. You won the Oscar for bad choices TM.

Thx for not asking whether that brain fart made any sense and wasting 5 days with implementing the worst of it all.

I gleefully await the day that languages are so high level that stack traces can be generated simply for unintended behavior, not just errors

My CTO uses an array instead of objectto keep list of items with random numerical keys. I told him you’re creating multiple unintended undefined members in between, he said: yeah that’s how silly JavaScript is :-|

I often ask myself why I chose this career path.

Right now, I had one of those moments where it all clicks and falls into place.

Where you can take a problem, have a rapid fire thought through your head and you've got all the modules in memory (pun unintended,) and it's just a case of touching keys.

I think that's why I do what I do. The feeling of satisfaction after you go 'I got it!'
🤙🤙

Has anybody ever touched the top corner of an app and said “yep, I totally meant to do that and wanted to scroll to the top of the document/ feed/ whatever.”

Because I haven’t. This “feature” sure seems to cause a lot of unintended behavior which sounds a lot like a bug. Who is out here developing stuff like this? Please stop! Do some real UX research with how we actually use the apps!

My colleague had some problems today.
He had problems from both user input and predefined strings sent with ajax to backend. The "&"-sign was splitting values in GET-requests into unintended parameters. So... he was simply going to search and replace all of those signs with the word "and"...

encodeURI()? Why are you sending our forms with GET-requests?! 🙃

Weird metro experience just now. Its a usual, busy friday morning, and i realized my metro card balance is down to 0. So went to the card counter, only to find a long long line. Fortunately, a person i know was between the starting 4 , therefore i got into the starting of the line.

When i my turn came, this hot slim lady(/aunty?) Of 25-26(or 30-35, god that makup!) Just barges from nowhere, pushes me aside in a triangular corner and places her card there. Of course my card was already with the guy at the counter, so i didn't care, my card will be recharged first.

The problem started when he gave my card back. The hot lady just covered the whole path, and i was struck between the two walls and her ... Er...ass(not literally, but her back was just touching the third wall. I loudly said "Excuse me", and she said "of course", but the lady had er, bigger assets than she expected . So i tried to get out, but yeah there was some unintended pressing, not my fault!

People need to either know their ass sizes or don't have to push others in tight corners. I hope she didn't felt junior Lannister :p

The spanish word for queue is "cola" wich is a synonim for ass, so putting things in a queue can have some unintended meaning here.

you know what annoys me about this situation the most ?

noone is living an ideal life
in any sense
except a few

but that being said, living less than ideal life if people had not wasted so much time, would have led to certain things becoming better.

example.

if i was out of development work, and had to take a crap job.

and lets say that ended up putting me in a financially unstable situation.

if i had rotten teeth, i could work part time, go to a sliding scale place and fix them one by one
while either educating myself further or looking for a better job because in truth, if i'm accepting a part time job, i must be fucked.

i don't see any longevity in an intensely physical job, I see an early death.

there are not enough paying people to ensure everyone has a skilled job, and truthfully not everyone can, but we have more people than we need to do the unskilled and skilled jobs both so why are we not running with that ?

the best time to do unskilled labor or just labor jobs period is when a person is young and there body is new.

and then not for long or with accommodation considering throwing your back out or fucking up your knees stays with you for life.

everything is so backwards in this country.

people think in terms so frequently these days in 'how can i make someone else suffer for my amusement and see their potential diminished so i feel better about my fucked up pathetic life ?'

or

'how can i get revenge against a person that doesn't deserve it'

or

'how can i ensure other people are totally boned so my charmed life i don't deserve seems satisfying'

its pretty gross as are these people

well fast forward years later and life appears fairly repetitive for alot of people

took a very large of detours here, had some fun, experienced some fucked up horros, saw a few wonders which were mostly based off my ideas, and some that were not.

still i return to what is to be done about our unfair, wasteful system ?

I've always been a fan of removing people's 'excuses' to neglect their children for example.
and definitely blocking all avenues of abuse.
even unintended, or pretended to be unintended.
i also hate people who smell because they don't clean themselves, and use excuses for that
I also hate people who make other people live in a situation where they can't take care of themselves and then try to dominate places they seek refuge because our fucking system sucks.

I also hate that there is more food than people can eat and restaurants closing when there are hungry people.

i also despise that we have more vacant houses in this country than we have family units.
some are just rotting away from neglect.

and i most especially hate people who get off on watching whole landscapes decay.

there is tons of work for the proper people
some of it is hard
some of it is tedious
its these kind of tasks that are necessary
the right spirit and the RIGHT COMPENSATION and the work gets done.. hopefully.

starting out with placing everyone in means to eat and sleep and clean themselves seems the most important.

everything else is icing on the cake, because by and large many people get sick of doing the same exact things, and people hate staring at the wall.

the problem is, there are alot of people who are, due to extreme damages from our modified culture, extremely abnormal, sadistic and untrustworthy around... anyone.

so with more time on their hands, they get bored and turn destructive and antisocial and breed people to be worse.

years I've been preaching this.
same people fly past in man places.
here and there some new fool marches in, eyes sparkling with malevolence, only to get caught in the same eternal loop and be absorbed into it.
i haven't seen one such as myself that I know of, that showed up with every intention of changing their life, becoming friendly with people, finding the things they enjoyed, and improving themselves intellectually, emotionally and socially; searching for an environment filled with more people who would be helpful to this extent, getting a rude awakening and realizing how horrible their country was becoming.

don't know if I should be happy being alone as the only sane person. heh.

I really don't want to be. I just want us to be happy. this is deserved after so much hardship. after seeing how people in general have become.

oh we all have lusts and vices and shortcomings, but the gulf that had grown between ordinary folk and the general population is astoundingly wide.

A question to all software security specialists of devRant. Please, take it serious.

Is it fundamentally possible to restrict a SQL database like Postgres in a way that unintended SQL queries are impossible to execute? Perhaps in some kind of whitelist fashion. Is it possible to achieve the kind of security that will be just fine exposed to the outside world akin to "SQL queries in onClick handlers" scenario?

Or is this an uphill battle of never being able to moderate an infinite set of possible fraudulent queries?

'Knock-Knock' seems more like a unintended bug turned into a feature 😂

CSS and libraries doesn't mix. Something about the lack of scoping and the unintended side effects that happen from using two different libraries that add inline style via JS. I'm looking at you, position!!!!