I'm editing the sidebar on one of our websites, and shuffling some entries. It involves moving some entries in/out of a dropdown and contextual sidebars, in/out of submenus, etc. It sounds a little tedious but overall pretty trivial, right?

This is day three.
I learned React+Redux from scratch (and rebuilt the latter for fun) in twice that long.

In my defense, I've been working on other tasks (see: Alerts), but mostly because I'd rather gouge my freaking eyes out than continue on this one.

Everything that could be wrong about this is. Everything that could be over-engineered is. Everything that could be written worse... can't, actually; it's awful.

Major grievances:
1) The sidebars (yes, there are several) are spread across a ridiculous number of folders. I stopped counting at 20.
2) Instead of icon fonts, this uses multiple images for entry states.
3) The image filenames don't match the menu entry names. at all. ("sb_gifts.png" -> orders); active filenames are e.g. "sb_giftsactive.png"
4) The actions don't match the menu entry names.
5) Menu state is handled within the root application controller, and doesn't use bools, but strings. (and these state flags never seem to get reset anywhere...)
6) These strings are used to construct the image filenames within the sidebar views/partials.
7) Sometimes access restrictions (employee, manager, etc.) are around the individual menu entries, sometimes they're around a partial include, meaning it's extremely difficult to determine which menu entries/sections/subsections are permission-locked without digging through everything.
8) Within different conditionals there are duplicate blocks markup, with duplicate includes, that end up render different partials/markup due to different state.
9) There are parent tags outside of includes, such as `<ul>#{render 'horrific-eye-stabbing'}</ul>`
10) The markup differs per location: sometimes it's a huge blob of non-semantic filthiness, sometimes it's a simple div+span. Example filth: section->p->a->(img,span) ... per menu entry.
11) In some places, the markup is broken, e.g. `<li><u>...</li></u>`
12) In other places, markup is used for layout adjustments, such as an single &nbsp; nested within several divs adorned with lots of styles/classes.
13) Per-device layouts are handled, not within separate views, but by conditionally enabling/disabling swaths of markup, e.g. (if is_cordova_session?).
14) `is_cordova_session` in particular is stored within a cookie that does not expire, and within your user session. disabling it is annoying and very non-obvious. It can get set whether or not you're using cordova.
15) There are virtually no stylesheets; almost everything is inline (but of course not actually everything), which makes for fun layout debugging.
16) Some of the markup (with inline styling, no less) is generated within a goddamn controller.
17) The markup does use css classes, but it's predominately not for actual styling: they're used to pick out elements within unit tests. An example class name: "hide-for-medium-down"; and no, I can't figure out what it means, even when looking at the tests that use it. There are no styles attached to that particular class.
18) The tests have not been updated for three years, and that last update was an rspec version bump.
19) Mixed tabs and spaces, with mixed indentation level (given spaces, it's sometimes 2, 4, 4, 5, or 6, and sometimes one of those levels consistently, plus an extra space thereafter.)
20) Intentional assignment within conditionals (`if var=possibly_nil_return_value()`)
21) hardcoded (and occasionally incorrect) values/urls.

... and last but not least:
22) Adding a new "menu sections unit" (I still haven't determined what the crap that means) requires changing two constants and writing a goddamn database migration.

I'm not even including minor annoyances like non-enclosed ternaries, poor naming conventions, commented out code, highly inefficient code, a 512-character regex (at least it's even, right?), etc.

just.

what the _fuck_

Who knew a sidebar could be so utterly convoluted?

Opening somebody else's code(11000+ lines in 2 js files) only to find a 100+ "var a" declarations and naming conventions like var chart1, var chart2. Best part? Not a single comment. Even better? The one who wrote the code doesn't remember what does what.

in personal projects, it is really easy to tell when I'm horny. you will find variable names like
- hotVar
- sluttyVar
- FUCK_ME_VAR

15 minutes after that commit naming becomes
- var

Do
{
// TODO: Do some proper naming
var myEgg = new Egg();
if(firstRun)
{
Paint(myEgg, red);
}
else
{
Paint(myEgg, randomPaint());
}
}While(isEaster())

Just found my first little game I wrote in c++ and opengl(like 5yrs ago). Need to rename over 300 file names, class names and for each class their members names and function names now because ewww how can you call vars in programming like that. Porting it to Linux now. Library linking is working yet. I remember how awful it was to do that shit in vs. In Linux its ez. Also wrote a makefile because vs always compiled my whole project every time I ran it (for whatever reason).

I think that's what I'm going to be doing as a side project this week.

How the fuck did we went from too little chars for naming, to too many chars, and managed to keep the same fucking lack of sense???

How the fuck is that better?
Before we had 2 letters var names, and now we have to scroll right to read them, and it still has no fucking direct meaning!!!!

How the fuck createMongoServerClientConnection is a good fucking name?!?!?!?! It has no fucking meaning!!!!

Asp seems to actually have feelings.

Today I tried to get an asp page to run for company stuff. Ok fair enough I load apache and all the modules required for it to run on Ubuntu. Everything went fine and nothing complained what a great start!
Let's create a directory called /var/www/html/astrash ( I wanted to be fun ok? ) and created a sample index.asp file and configured the paths etc accordingly.
So I went to my beloved browser and typed in localhost/astrash/index.asp
Guess what happened? Right. I could only download the file.
Tried to change several things and Googled a bit but the things I tried didn't work.
So I figured let's create the directory /var/www/html/asp and an index.asp to go along. Same content. Same owner same access bits.
Went to localhost/index.asp and I saw the sample page!
I laughed my ass off at this actually thinking asp knew that I was a dick in naming the folder like that 😂

PS: yes I know it's probably a misconfiguration but it's funny nonetheless

Ok, so currently in my Java course on Udemy we are going more in-depth into scope and visibility, and I'm currently doing the challenge for it.

So I'm doing it and the challenge is to have every single name of a variable or method be called 'x' (just to better understand scope and vis, he mentions how this is not a good practice AT ALL) with the exceptions of the classes and scanner var (but there is an optional challenge to also make them named x).

Now that I progressed into it, I noticed something. This challenge is literally making me make my code so DRY and outside-the-box-thinking that, what if, this could be a practice?

Not the naming everything in your code the same var name, but doing that at the start and then renaming the variables after coding. Because right now, I feel as though I am using SO MUCH less code than if I had the liberty of naming my classes, methods, and variables different things, it's actually kinda cool.

I'll attach my code from the challenge to this after by it really amazed me how well my code looked compared to my previous challenges and even personal projects!