18000 duplicate lines that were manually copy pasted by the previous programmer.

I replaced them with a for loop.

I don’t think it was that hard…

A sidebar.
Literally just a sidebar.
And yes, this was in Hell.

Its code was spread across at least 40 files, and it used a bunch of freaking global variables to unfurl accordion sections, hide other sections/items, highlight the active item, etc. These were set (and unset!) in controller actions, so if you didn’t unset one, it remained open and highlighted until another action unset it.

Some of the global variable checks (and permissions checks) were done in the individual views, some outside of the `render` statements that include them. Some of them inherited variables from the parent, some from the controller, some from globals. Getting a view to work was trial and error. Oh, and some had their own inline css, some used css classes.

Subsections were separate views, so were some individual items, both sometimes rendered using shared templates, and all of the views and templates had the exact. same. filename. (They were located in different directories, and thus located automagically via implicit relative paths.) So, it was a virtually endless parade of`render partial => “sidebar”`. Which file does that point to? Good luck figuring it out!

Also, comments in several places said adding a new section required a database migration. I never did figure out why.

Anyway, I discovered this because I had an innocuous-sounding ticket to rearrange the sidebar, group some sections/items under different permissions, move some items to another menu, and nest some others differently.

It took me two bloody weeks, and this was when I was extremely productive every day.

Afterward, I was so disgusted by it that I took a day and removed every trace of the sidebar I could find, and rewrote it. I defined the sidebar in a hash, and wrote a simple recursive builder to generate the markup. It supported optional icons, n-level nesting, automatic highlighting of the current item and all parent nodes, compound and inherited permissions, wrapping of long names, hover and unfurl animations, etc. Took me a couple hundred lines of Ruby at the most, plus about the same of css.

Felt so good to remove that blight.

Adding a feature to 18 000 undocumented lines of code, written in PL/SQL. Oh, did I mention it was just a single function?

On my former job we once bought a competing company that was failing.

Not for the code but for their customers.

But to make the transition easy we needed to understand their code and database to make a migration script.

And that was a real deep dive.

Their system was built on top of a home grown platform intended to let customers design their own business flows which meant it contained solutions for forms and workflow path design. But that never hit of so instead they used their own platform to design a new system for a more specific purpose.

This required some extra functionality and had it been for their customers to use that functionality would have been added to the platform.

But since they had given up on that they took an easy route and started adding direct references between the code and the configuration.

That is, in the configuration they added explicit class names and method names to be used as data store or for actions.

This was of cause never documented in any way.

And it also was a big contributing cause to their downfall as they hit a complexity they could not handle.

Even the slightest change required synchronizing between the config in the db and the compiled code, which meant you could not see mistakes in compilation but only by trying out every form and action that touched what you changed.

And without documentation or search tools that also meant that no one new could work the code, you had to know what used what to make any changes.

Luckily for us we mostly only needed to understand the storage in the database but even that took about a month to map out WITH the help of their developer ;)

It was not only the “inner platform” it was abusing and breaking the inner platform in more was I can count.

If you are going down the inner platform, at least make sure you go all the way and build it as if it was for the customers, then you at least keep it consistent and keep a clear border between platform and how it is used.

"read the code" he said
"all the requirements and business process is in there"

Knok knok...who is there...................
VB6

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.

That's true

How’s this for a horror story? Adding a new feature to a 6,000 line and 100% undocumented stored procedure in a 20+ year old Oracle database.

I briefly worked for a fucked up company that had been bought by a coupon company that had outsourced a project to India

The code contained such gems as

If (Booleanvar ==true)

Among many other little things and some really big ones and was a web project written in vb

Website from 2011.
Made from a 2007 template.
The database was in latin1.
The template wasn't even a good one, an adapted hotel booking example for a main page, contact, and news.
There were unused variables and weird functions everywhere.
3 years later and I still don't understand how it managed images. Not that I care to look back.

Objective-C.

Nuff said.

Working on codebase of a 20+ year old system that the company I work for bought five years ago and in that time there’s been no refactoring, no security updates, no attempt to create automated testing (there is none), new features have just been built on the codebase with no regard for quality and it’s just spun into the horror cesspool that it is today.

I joined one year ago and I’m slowly refactoring the codebase and updating it to get it to a more modern codebase, cleaner code, faster load times and creating a ton of dev documentation so the devs in India can start getting into best practices and start producing quality code.

It never ends…

It just sits there, staring at you, begging to be fixed, and when you try and get to it, it bites your hand ferociously, forcing you to retreat. And this same circle goes on, and on, and on…

I've worked on a year to replace an old legacy system after years of shitty maintenance. We're almost there. So damn fucking close.

Eight years of legacy consolidated in one frontend repo. Felt like an archaeologist digging up React 15, then Backbone, then jQuery and other ancient relics.

Some Java code I looked through to figure out how to accurately rework a mapping of value intervals to status colors:

• 16 levels of indentation
• Calls an instance method one line before a null-check
• Assigns that same value to a new variable and null-checks it again
• Insistently loops over existing HashMaps' entry sets to find a value by key
• Stringifies a Gson object, parses back the string and then null-checks the result.
• Mixes up the 'leq' and 'geq' comparison operators twice, which is why I went to check the implementation in the first place.

And this wasn't even legacy code. It's from last year.

Internal monitoring dashboard that was made in PHP4 that was really slow (even for PHP4 standards) due to doing a lot of unnecessary things.
Fully uncommented, fully undocumented elsewhere, massive fustercluck of code.
Had to change at least 300 methods in order to make is somewhat run decent (sadly, I wasn't allowed to just rewrite from scratch, which would have been a lot faster)...

Just your regular SNAFU.

I took up on a very badly maintained project. You could see that the devs never talked to each other: there was repeated code everywhere, mixingCamelCase with_snake_case, functions that did two very different things and two functions that did almost the exact same. The frameworks being used were a couple of years old (jQuery and its crew) but we wanted to migrate to the more modern ones (Vue and its crew). Instead of nice row-based aggregates in SQL, they preferred to loop through the response and firing up N^2 SQL requests. On top of that, the company was changing its target market, so we wanted to make the code more abstract to fit different customers. To reflect this, they wanted to change the names of the core models.

Oh and did I say that I was the only competent dev in charge of this? The rest were interns.

Maybe our old buildsystem that runs using mock and an python 2 script on a RHEL 6 machine OR
The incredible complex system of a gouvernment customer that had a networkplan on DIN A2(or A1 i don't know it anymore) since A3 was too small. i was responsible because everyone else left (because of different reasons) or was too busy.

Legacy code horror story:

My whole life.

Not a horror. I'm rewriting services.

It started as a help request. I was asked to help with completing a service dealing with push notifications which was a research prototype. It was suggested to keep core part of it, but it was so awful that I just removed all files and wrote the service from scratch.

The second service had been developed for more than a year by a junior and then by our manager who wanted to complete it as fast as possible, without taking care of code quality. Then I was asked to take over the project and after some time I agreed with one condition: I'll have 1 month on takeover. But when I looked at the code, it became clear that it's much faster and better to rewrite everything except API and database than to takeover existing code.

The third service dealing with file exchange was working, but the junior who wrote it advised to rewrite it because it was a very simple service. So, I initiated rewriting, designed a new API and reviewed the final result.

And now I'm dealing with the fourth one. It was developed in my team but not under control. Now, when I "inherited" this complicated project, I decided to rewrite it because it should be simple, but it doesn't. It features reflection, layers inside layers, strange namespaces, strange solution structure. And that's after months of refactorings and improvements. So, wish me luck because I want to keep part of the infrastructure, but I don't know if it's possible.