100% Real. And it's not even the worst on the site.

Being 100% serious, I saw a guy in my Computer Programming I class using MS Word to write code that he would copy, then paste into notepad. When I asked him why he did that, he said, "Microsoft Word is easier to read than notepad."

He ended up dropping the class and changed majors.

I worked with a good dev at one of my previous jobs, but one of his faults was that he was a bit scattered and would sometimes forget things.

The story goes that one day we had this massive bug on our web app and we had a large portion of our dev team trying to figure it out. We thought we narrowed down the issue to a very specific part of the code, but something weird happened. No matter how often we looked at the piece of code where we all knew the problem had to be, no one could see any problem with it. And there want anything close to explaining how we could be seeing the issue we were in production.

We spent hours going through this. It was driving everyone crazy. All of a sudden, my co-worker (one referenced above) gasps “oh shit.” And we’re all like, what’s up? He proceeds to tell us that he thinks he might have been testing a line of code on one of our prod servers and left it in there by accident and never committed it into the actual codebase. Just to explain this - we had a great deploy process at this company but every so often a dev would need to test something quickly on a prod machine so we’d allow it as long as they did it and removed it quickly. It was meant for being for a select few tasks that required a prod server and was just going to be a single line to test something. Bad practice, but was fine because everyone had been extremely careful with it.

Until this guy came along. After he said he thought he might have left a line change in the code on a prod server, we had to manually go in to 12 web servers and check. Eventually, we found the one that had the change and finally, the issue at hand made sense. We never thought for a second that the committed code in the git repo that we were looking at would be inaccurate.

Needless to say, he was never allowed to touch code on a prod server ever again.

15,000 line main. It’s our flagship product. 🤮

Using Base64 "encryption" to store credit card numbers and passwords

Who needs css when you have <table>?

"I'm gonna delete my facebook, they are spying on us!"
*reloads her instagram*

"I'm gonna archive my facebook & delete it."
*uploads fb archive to google drive*

Click Edit > Copy, click Edit > Paste.

Every. Single. Time.

My classmate just threatened the monitor, because his code isn't working.

*Caps lock* *letter* *Caps lock* *rest of name*

Copied an ISO file to a flash drive and wonderd why it doesn't boot...

A fellow intern recommended the use of windows server for security and speed reasons.

Few details about the situation: windows server got hacked due to a vulnerability which had no patch released yet and this had happened multiple times that year. Also, the company was migrating everything to Linux (servers).

The senior/lead programmer literally gave him a GTFO face and pointed at the door.

Everyone was giving him the GTFO face by the way, he didn't know how fast he had to get out 🤣

I worked on a greenfield project a couple of years ago. The company had an old solution written in Omnis (heard of it? Yeah, me neither) with an SQL database. My team was to create a completely new web based system... on top of the old database, so the customers could keep their existing stuff.

The dba was an intelligent man, one of the nicest people I've met, and over the course of fifteen years he had made a remarkably terrifying monstrosity of a database. Some years before me they wanted to "future proof" the system and make it "easier to switch to new technologies". So they moved the entire business logic into the database...

I used a tool to create a visualization of said database when we started. It had no views, only tables and sprocs. Look at it! Tables and sprocs are rectangles (well, dots) and any connections are drawn in grey lines. There were no foreign keys, so a tables only visualization only yielded a collection of independent rectangles without a single line.

Now, the stored procedures were bloody MASSIVE. A single procedure that only registered a new interested party and attached them to a property had 2500+ lines and over 150 parameters.

Also, this dba added features and fixed bugs by logging into the respective customers production server and writing SQL.

That database is the stupidest thing I've ever seen a developer do.

public boolean even( int num ) {
if ( num < 0 )
num = -1 * num;
while ( num > 1 )
num = num - 2;
if ( num == 0 )
return true;
else
return false;
}

This is real.

String query = "select password from users where username = " + username;

Hi client,

I am not able to login to your prod server. Can you please verify the following:

Host: x.y.x.y
Port: 1234
Username: ABCD
Password: password1234

Thanks,
My idiotic coworker

Found on live website...

OMFG I just realized that I was around at wk1

Fuck, Its been 99 already

Freaking genius dev made a system access password @$$Monk3y1

Had to share that with a vendor...on a conference call

Worst thing you've seen another dev do?

Not adding node_modules to gitignore.

Write a small js function using setInterval to fire a request every second ... then copy paste the code 450 times (literally, not an exaggeration) into a massive file to create a load test script.

This load test script also had no means to gather metrics or test response times or anything useful. It was literally a “did the server crash” test.

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Long one, but has a happy ending.

Classic 'Dev deploys to production at 5:00PM on a Friday, and goes home.' story.

The web department was managed under the the Marketing department, so they were not required to adhere to any type of coding standards and for months we fought with them on logging. Pre-Splunk, we rolled our own logging/alerting solution and they hated being the #1 reason for phone calls/texts/emails every night.

Wanting to "get it done", 'Tony' decided to bypass the default logging and send himself an email if an exception occurred in his code.

At 5:00PM on a Friday, deploys, goes home.

Around 11:00AM on Sunday (a lot folks are still in church at this time), the VP of IS gets a call from the CEO (who does not go to church) about unable to log into his email. VP has to leave church..drive home and find out he cannot remote access the exchange server. He starts making other phone calls..forcing the entire networking department to drive in and get email back up (you can imagine not a group of happy people)

After some network-admin voodoo, by 12:00, they discover/fix the issue (know it was Tony's email that was the problem)

We find out Monday that not only did Tony deploy at 5:00 on a Friday, the deployment wasn't approved, had features no one asked for, wasn't checked into version control, and the exception during checkout cost the company over $50,000 in lost sales.

Was Tony fired? Noooo. The web is our cash cow and Tony was considered a top web developer (and he knew that), Tony decided to blame logging. While in the discovery meeting, Tony told the bosses that it wasn't his fault logging was so buggy and caused so many phone calls/texts/emails every night, if he had been trained properly, this problem could have been avoided.

Well, since I was responsible for logging, I was next in the hot seat.

For almost 30 minutes I listened to every terrible thing I had done to Tony ever since he started. I was a terrible mentor, I was mean, I was degrading, etc..etc.
Me: "Where is this coming from? I barely know Tony. We're not even in the same building. I met him once when he started, maybe saw him a couple of times in meetings."
Andrew: "Aren't you responsible for this logging fiasco?"
Me: "Good Lord no, why am I here?"
Andrew: "I'll rephrase so you'll understand, aren't you are responsible for the proper training of how developers log errors in their code? This disaster is clearly a consequence of your failure. What do you have to say for yourself?"
Me: "Nothing. Developers are responsible for their own choices. Tony made the choice to bypass our logging and send errors to himself, causing Exchange to lockup and losing sales."
Andrew: "A choice he made because he was not properly informed of the consequences? Again, that is a failure in the proper use of logging, and why you are here."
Me: "I'm done with this. Does John know I'm in here? How about you get John and you talk to him like that."
'John' was the department head at the time.
Andrew:"John, have you spoken to Tony?"
John: "Yes, and I'm very sorry and very disappointed. This won't happen again."
Me: "Um...What?"
John: "You know what. Did you even fucking talk to Tony? You just sit in your ivory tower and think your actions don't matter?"
Me: "Whoa!! What are you talking about!? My responsibility for logging stops with the work instructions. After that if Tony decides to do something else, that is on him."
John: "That is not how Tony tells it. He said he's been struggling with your logging system everyday since he's started and you've done nothing to help. This behavior ends today. We're a fucking team. Get off your damn high horse and help the little guy every once in a while."
Me: "I don't know what Tony has been telling you, but I barely know the guy. If he has been having trouble with the one line of code to log, this is the first I've heard of it."
John: "Like I said, this ends today. You are going to come up with a proper training class and learn to get out and talk to other people."

Over the next couple of weeks I become a powerpoint wizard and 'train' anyone/everyone on the proper use of logging. The one line of code to log. One line of code.

A friend 'Scott' sits close to Tony (I mean I do get out and know people) told me that Tony poured out the crocodile tears. Like cried and cried, apologizing, calling me everything but a kitchen sink,...etc. It was so bad, his manager 'Sally' was crying, her boss 'Andrew', was red in the face, when 'John' heard 'Sally' was crying, you can imagine the high levels of alpha-male 'gotta look like I'm protecting the females' hormones flowing.

Took almost another year, Tony released a change on a Friday, went home, web site crashed (losses were in the thousands of $ per minute this time), and Tony was not let back into the building on Monday (one of the best days of my life).

Not knowing git or github. His idea was to exchange the code via SKYPE

At my previous job, the person in charge of the Phabricator server didn't have a backup system in place. I yelled at him until he implemented one.

He had the server perform backups to the same drive. I yelled at him again, to no avail.

Well, after awhile the hard drive started failing, and it would only boot intermittently. After a lot of effort, he was able to salvage part of the backup data, but no more, meaning we lost a lot of bug reports and feedback, and developer tickets. We were able recover all of the older lost tickets from a previous server, so overall the loss was pretty small.

But I think he learned his lesson.
He definitely learned to listen.

Once I had to clone a repo and it was taking too long...

Went to gitlab to find out in the most wtf way that from 1mb it was 600mb+ now...

One of our new juniors pushed 600mb+ of a database backup to gitlab...

I came to her with a smile and asked in a jokingly manner (after cursing her for about half an hour in my head):

"lol, did you really not notice it took a fucking long time to upload it?"

The fucker was ashamed but just said : no, I think I pushed it and went home.

I constantly reminded her of it for the couple months...

Never done it again :)

Copy code from StackOverflow and paste it. Then complaint on why is it giving a Variable Not Found.

Sending files on WhatsApp inspite of having a slack workspace and git 😑😑😑😑😑

*opens new tab*

*types 'google' into URL bar*

...is navigated to google home page...

*proceeds to enter desired query into the same URL bar*

code in word

Server password is Password321 like wtf 😐🤦🤷

This teacher who sells MD5 without salt as an unhackable hashing method in 2018

Yahoo

Having a server with a lower spec CPU and RAM than dev machines, to ensure that if it works on the dev machine it will always run perfectly on the server.

This means we can avoid any debugging tools or techniques (including console logs), because “it will be perfect and it’s not necessary”.

Don't use git

Work in a company where Github, StackOverflow, Slack is Blocked by a Firewall and Develop code which they think are futuristic but of Stone age :-(

Receiving my password by email (yes, plain text) when I click on "forgot your password".

My ex-boss, a self proclaimed dev, used to click on a folder on Windows, then right click, then click Open.

Push the node_modules folder to github so heroku won't need to run `npm install`.

Writing customer passwords fulltext into the prod database because "it's easier to associate them with the user"

Wanna hear THE Worst Thing ever seen:

NOT EVEN A SINGLE SEMICOLON( ; ) IN
>200 lines of JAVA CODE.

*Blind Eyes*

My boss fancies himself a tech. So he started exporting data from the users table. And deleting them after exporting them. You know so he can keep track of what he has exported. He deleted his own admin account in WordPress. And than asked me to remake it.

Void foo() {
try {
//Try something
} catch(exception e) {
foo();
}
}

When I saw this in production I cried a little...

Spaces instead of tabs... Is there anything worse you could do? Nope, cant think of it...

Use a light theme.

so i guess ill use my code.org teacher for this:

"credit card information is encrypted with the public keys"

"lists and arrays are the same thing"

"javascript is a powerful, fast, programming language" (bhahahaha)

"javascript is [only] used in web browsers"

"java and javascript are *extremely similar* but not the same"

Typing Google into Google in order to Google a problem

The worst thing I’ve seen a dev do is create a social sharing platform that sells its user data to the highest bidder and then asks for forgiveness after the privacy horse is out of the barn.

public void method()
{
// :(
}

instead of

public void method() {
// :)
}

bothers me more than it should

The documentation was in Japanese because he doesn’t understand English

Like, how am I supposed to collab with you

Wouldn't say this is the worst thing, but this indentation really kills me.

"Can you help me with this program?"
*sends code on Messenger*

Instead of a loop, he wrote it by hand line for line... My eyes man... My eyes...

A friend was writing a small game. He asked me to take a look at why the FPS where horrible although he was only drawing the background each tick.

He had about 10 different images that were used to draw the background tiles. Each iteration of the game loop he would loop over all tile positions, determine which image to use for this tile, load the image from disk and create a new tile using the image, which then would be drawn and forgot.

#!/bin/sh
# Application X deployment script

## some code ##

function sudo_remove {
directory=$1
filename=$2
sudo /bin/rm -rf $directry/$filename
}

### some more code using function above ##

>400 servers completely corrupted. Twice in one week.

Who can spot it? :)

Actually just 2 hours ago my boss showed me his "hack" which solved a problem he worked on half of the day.
My eyes suddenly began to itch heavily and I felt a strong urge to quit immediately.

The problem was no big thing and we actually spoke about it at noon and I made a proposition how he could solve it.
Turns out he .... aaaaaahhhh I better do not mention it, as it may summon evil spirits... sorry.

Encrypting passwords with AES and storing the decryption key alongside te passwords file.

Seen another dev push changes to a production server without even committing it to git.

Once crafted a beautifully executed use of Polymorphism with intuitive interfaces and classes with a concise and loose code just to watch my boss get rid of the interface , because it had no code in it, and fill the fucking code with an ugly switch statement to choose which class to instantiate.

SELECT * FROM VISA_CARDS

...yes, every bit as bad as you imagine

(and yes, there were other tables for other card providers. Insult to injury... in like.. a fractal of mistakes)

Making our own linked list class in C++
This is how he deleted his list in the destructor

~myList() {
delete head;
}

Gets a couple of points off, blames the prof for biased marking

not the worst by itself, except I keep finding them everywhere

if(thingThatIsTrue == true) {
// omfg
}

or it's inbred cousin

if(!thingThatIsTrue == false) {
//herpa derp
}

Once i found a legacy code where the old dev avoided the execution of some lines by wrapping them with a
if (1 == 0) {...}

Reject a Coffee...

Writing all the major functionality of our app in a 10000 line class ( I shit you not) and then call it Utils.java.

I’m surrounded by devs that use the light theme in IntelliJ. It triggers me more than any bad code 😂😂😂

Storing passwords in plain text.

To be fair, it was a feature requested by the client, but still...

At least encrypt it man.

"How does return work? Why should a value come back?"

In college we were assigned to groups for a semester long project. One of the guys in my group made it abundantly clear that he had been programming far longer than the rest of us and that this project was beneath him. On the other hand, at my school the program for graphic design and development shared many core classes that required programming knowledge. It was common to encounter students who had no experience at all even in intermediate level courses. Fast forward to the end of the semester right before finals. We are working on this project together and one of my team members accidentally creates a directory in the wrong folder(graphic design student). So the experienced guy, who had become convinced that we were only slowing him down, tells him to just type "rm -rf /". Everything on this poor kids whole hard drive...gone. Design projects due the next week all deleted. He ended up having to retake a few of the courses simply because that dude was a dick.

Ask for help then send blurry screenshots of the code

never wrote any unit tests

I have previously seen this in a production code base. The same code base included nested if statements (20+ conditions)...

If (condition == false) {
return false;
} else if (condition == true) {
return true;
}

Share code via USB

git commit -m "fix"

Junior dev requests for sudo access on a server instance for some package installation, gets it, figures out how to open the root shell - never goes back. They do everything on root.

Fast forward to production deployment time, their application won't run without elevated privileges. Sysadmin asks why does the application require elevated privileges. Dev answers, "Because I set it up with root" :facepalm:

input = readPin(x);
if (input == 1)writePin(y, 1);
if (input == 0)writePin(y, 0);

(When I saw this I wanted to pull off my eyes)

Adding big pile of 40+ megabytes pictures to git repo.

Came as senior software developer, never used git before.

Hard coded their own credentials in a project repository.

Me: here's the code.

Sr: allright, looks fairly ok. Just change all *FIELD* modifiers to protected rather than private.

Me: what? Why???

Sr: bcz that's the code style we've adopted.

Me: srsly? If so.. Where do you use private fields then?

Sr: nowhere. We use either protected or public so we could extend any class we want

1. talked to a dev and found out he never used git
2. saw a guy formatting the code in eclipse line by line, even when eclipse provides automatic formatting.

not wearing a black hoody, gloves, 3 holed ski mask while programmming.

ALU: Algorithmic Logarithmic Unit

1. Naming all variables with letters of the alphabets
2. Not indenting (screw tabs VS spaces, I could use anything here)
3. Putting all src files in one directory
4. Writing the entire code without using any functions
5. Writing code and asking me to fix linting
6. Asking why they should follow language style guidelines

Guy needs to read some excel data...

Decides to write his function like this:

function readCell(){
fopen('filename.csv');
//some more code
fclose();
return cellValue;
}

This function was called multiple times per row of data...

Multiple hundreds of rows...

WHY

Sorry I can't speak of any of the projects my company is working on 😁

Last year, we had to do a big university project in randomly selected groups (5-6 students in every group).Three of the five guys were completely useless, I mean, both the other competent guy and me wrote around 20,000 lines of code each, the other ones wrote around 500 lines of code (combined).
After our first few meetings we quickly knew that we have to give them a small task which was so trivial that not even they can fuck it up. But we were wrong. Oh boy, so wrong.
They simply had to code the excel export of the data, which means they had to use two functions from a library and pass the correct data. But their solution was so bad, I lost faith in humanity and was fascinated by it at the same time.
For example, there was this simple class "Room", which had a few properties like size or number of seats and a few getter/setter etc. That was a core class and written by the other qualified guy. So how did the others fuck up the excel export? They somehow rewrote that class in German (although the other code was completely in English), implemented a function for each property that would write its value to a hardcoded cell in a hardcoded excel file.
And this was just the tip of the iceberg. Needlessly to say that I had to rewrite the whole export in the night before we had to present the project.

Over use of !important statements instead of fixing the real issue.

Worst one I’ve seen so far is when I was working for my previous community another developer joined to help me, without the permission of me or the other lead developer he pushed a client-side update. We didn’t think it was a big deal, but once we began reviewing the code it became a big deal... he had placed our SQL credentials into that file that every client downloads. All the person had to do was open the file and could connect to our SQL which contained 50k+ players info, primarily all in-game stuff except IPs which we want to protect at all costs.

Issue becomes, what he was trying to do required the games local database on the client-side, but instead he tried connecting to it as an external database so he decided to copy server-side code and used on the client.

Anyways, the database had a firewall that blocked all connections except the server and the other lead dev and myself. We managed to change the credentials and pull the file away before any harm was done to it, about 300 people had downloaded the file within an hours period, but nothing happened luckily. IP to the DB, username, password, etc, were all changed just to keep it protected.

So far this is the worst, hopefully it doesn’t get worse than this :/

My compsci II Prof pirates windows 7 for his openbox vm to teach C++

Write a search for a CRM that deleted results from the database instead of showing them.

A class with nearly 70% code duplication by 2900 Lines of Code.

Worst thing I've seen a Dev do? Blame others even if it shows in the git blame that it is his fault 😂 no equality, ego and hard headed. Wants to show every one that he's always right 😂 well good luck with karma. What an attitude lol

class Fraction {
public double dValue;
int numerator;
int denom;
...
public UpdateDouble()
{
dValue = numerator/denom;
}
...
}

Hating on every other language that he/she doesn't use.

Copy paste from the internet, usually stack overflow without knowing what the fuck the lines do.
I saw this girl who was tasked with building a spring mvc application and she literally googled(yeah googled) "spring mvc web app" and copied from the first tutorial site and pasted it.
When errors showed up she copied everything from the second link and pasted it ... Wait for it... Without deleting the old copy but commenting it out so each file had 100 lines of code and 100 lines of comment

Embedding private encryption key in production javascript file and fetching third party session token client side.

To not waste time, let's just commit my work and put the message as ".....". Oh, and let's do that dozens of times.

---

One day we had to git bisect his work and found that. Then, obviously, we asked him "what the commit with five dots do?" he said that there was a a lot of them, and i proceeded to explain why it was a bad idea to not write a proper commit message.

He is a good dev, so he understood and started to write what the commit does, instead of five dots.

Didn't get any words about that

Blaming someone else for their own mistake.

Damn senior guy from storage background worked for a big company, he wants to learn git and so I told him to install git from git scm portal.
Well he did and came back saying its not working. I wondered thats not possible to curiousity I when to.his desk and found he was using fucking windows xp sp3 on his laptop.

I told him can you install windows 10
Well he tried but his fucking hardware doesnt support.

Wondered seriously why on earth this guy still using windows xp

I've seen many devs doing crazy things in my entire career till now. But this one dude stands out.
He used to:
- Push binaries to git repo
- Use some old libraries which were used during Indus Valley civilization
- Had no sense of database and used to delete random data from it and call it as TESTING (Thank God! I never gave him prod access)
- And on top of this, he had an ass full of attitude!

Dev colleague when searching something on Windows:

* Click the windows button
* Click the search button next to windows button
* Type the search string
* Wait for results to load
* Use the mouse again to click the first search result.

I try to keep calm, but this annoys me soooooo much... 😫

import *; //imports everything :D

class MyJava{
//Some code here....
}

When I just started my software engineering course in college, we had a group project every semester where we would use the skills learned during that semester to make a certain product or program.

For the semester in this story, we were tasked with making a reservation system for a campsite. Visitors would be able to select a free spot, and reserve it.

The spot reservation screen would be a map of the campsite, and visitors would click on the desired site on the map to select it. Sites were neatly laid out in a perfect grid.

My task in the group for this project was my favourite position: yelling at people for poor code quality. And boy did I get to yell.

Any semi competent programmer would probably come up with two simple loops to generate all the buttons (something like 144 buttons), one loop to fill a row, and then another to go down the rows until all were filled. Some other similar functionality in the program was solved this way.

However, my classmate that was responsible for this part of the code wasn't a big fan of concise programming. So instead, he wrote 144 functions aptly called `generateFirstButton()` all the way through `generateHundredFourtyFourthButton()`.

*what*

I called him out on his horribly smelly code, and his retort was "But it works, and now you don't have to think about complicated loop logic".

I rewrote the class and reduced it from ~1150 lines to about 20 lines.

He didn't pass the exam.

I hate it when my classmates don't fucking indent their code properly.
IS IT THAT HARD?

So c# has its own system.collections.list and system.collections.generics.list<type> classes. And this guy wrote his own list (no generics) using an object[] array which always had same size.

Pick his nose and well
You know what happened next..

Hey! You said what another dev did, not mandatory dev related! Exploited the question

Oh man where to start:

Not wanting to use LINQ because he did not wanted to "download external dependencies"

Not wanting to use prepared statements on their php sql code, and refusing to use pdo because they will "always use mysql"(moved to postgreSQL shortly after I left)

For some reason including a php file that only had ?>......thats it....only ?>

Use c++ but refused to learn oop and use structs for everything, importing stdio.h and printf everything.....like really?

Maybe just nitpicking, but refusing to use the recyclerview pattern on am android app. The implementation was faster after I made the change.

Importing a library for promises instead of using the ones already in the language(JS)

Changing the style of aaaaall p tags instead of using classes as well as refusing to use divs in place of p tags...well...fuck

Not indent his ASP classic code

Use notepad on his asp classic code

Use ASP Classic in 2017, even for new projects

The worst thing I've seen another developer do is not give constructive criticism where needed, as well was fail to accept constructive criticism when offered.

So far, no one has surpassed the ultimately blasphemous practice of
Select text -> right click -> copy -> right click -> paste

Not devs, but many of my classmates still type with one finger

git revert - without knowing how git works

git push —force

Worst thing I've seen another dev do?

Wordpress.
Today.

There was an android project that I got from my senior.

he told me that another developer already completed most the project and all I have to do is minor changes...

Well when i saw, i was amazed that the code he commented is more than the actual working code without any structure.
He copied most of code from internet.

If it's not working, put in comment else use it.

It took me a whole month to figure out what's going on.

And another 2 months to fix the issues.

Well in last my senior told me that the developer took 1 year to write this code
(to be honest any normal developer can complete that project in less than 3 month)

I have seen try/catch staments and rest api calls on a class constructor! OMG

So we had a class that should have 2 states 0 or 1, you think my coworker would be smart enough to represent it with a Boolean? NO!

Represent the state inside the object as an int then when using the object in a function creates a Boolean that determines the state of the object and after the function done it's job THEN call another function that takes the object and the Boolean and change the int state inside the object depending on the Boolean.

Wouldn't it have been whole lot easier to just you know..... Make the state a Boolean from the start.

When I saw this I knew I was witnessing a miracle of the human mind. God bless!

Ps: it wasn't connected to any kind of API nor server and there are never more than 2 states. It's just some local sequential code so don't assume it had a logical reason it's just a fuck up.

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Here is another.

Early into our eCommerce venture, we experienced the normal growing pains.

Part of the learning process was realizing in web development, you should only access data resources on an as-needed basis.

One business object on it's creation would populate db lookups, initialize business rule engines (calling the db), etc.

Initially, this design was fine, no one noticed anything until business started to grow and started to cause problems in other systems (classic scaling problems)

VP wanted a review of the code and recommendations before throwing hardware at the problem (which they already started to do).

Over a month, I started making some aggressive changes by streamlining SQL, moving initialization, and refactoring like a mad man.

Over all page loads were not really affected, but the back-end resources were almost back to pre-eCommerce levels.

The main web developer at the time was not amused and fought my changes as much as she could.

Couple months later the CEO was speaking to everyone about his experience at a trade show when another CEO was complementing him on the changes to our web site.
The site was must faster, pages loaded without any glitches, checkout actually worked the first time, etc.
CEO wanted to thank everyone involved etc..and so on.

About a week later the VP handed out 'Thank You' certificates for the entire web team (only 4 at the time, I was on another team). I was noticeably excluded (not that I cared about a stupid piece of paper, but they also got a pizza lunch...I was much more pissed about that). My boss went to find out what was going on.

MyBoss: "Well, turned out 'Sally' did make all the web site performance improvements."
Me: "Where have you been the past 3 months? 'Sally' is the one who fought all my improvements. All my improvements are still in the production code."
MyBoss: "I'm just the messenger. What would you like me to do? I can buy you a pizza if you want. The team already reviewed the code and they are the ones who gave her the credit."
Me: "That's crap. My comments are all over that code base. I put my initials, date, what I did, why, and what was improved. I put the actual performance improvement numbers in the code!"
MyBoss: "Yea? Weird. That is what 'Tom' said why 'Sally' was put in for a promotion. For her due diligence for documenting the improvements."
Me:"What!? No. Look...lets look at the code"

Open up the file...there it was...*her* initials...the date, what changed, performance improvement numbers, etc.

WTF!

I opened version control and saw that she made one change, the day *after* the CEO thanked everyone and replaced my initials with hers.

She knew the other devs would only look at the current code to see who made the improvements (not bother to look at the code-differences)

MyBoss: "Wow...that's dirty. Best to move on and forget about it. Let them have their little party. Let us grown ups keeping doing the important things."

Use light theme. Enough said.

This.

Not the worst but almost all of us (including me) handle strings like fucking morons.

If the input doesn't need to be an exact match we use a explicit comparison operator, when the input should explicitly match we do a loose comparison operator.

I'll format the crap out of a number, convert it, validate decimal places, check for float rounding hell, give it a absolute value and return it correctly formatted for the users locale but half the time I forget to trim their input. 🤦‍♂

Like I said - just a tad fucking moronic isn't it?

Hundreds of PHP files with same name and _# at the end to differentiate them - each containing hundreds of
$(document).ready(function() {
$(some_slector).on(some_event, function() {
//one line of code
}
}

A group member in my senior level computer science class is afraid of the command line so they change code through the GitHub website, essentially using it like Google Drive.

I seen a dev disable failing integration tests that started failing after his code change

Merge a if(true) into master ×_×

Being non existant.

But at least he won't do any mistakes that way 😀. (I'm so lonely in this city!)

Well I haven't seen any of devs killing people .. so none I guess. 🤷

Copying a javascript anonymous function (Yes, the whole function) 11 times with only one parameter changing
I'm currently cleaning it up...

O H B O Y F U N D A Y S I N C O M M I N G...

Didn't write comments...

The worst thing I've seen a developer do would be becoming a university teacher while not being able to understand simple OOP or good programming practices.

I can't think of a most harmful one, just mediocrity cultivating unknowingly mediocre devs.

Using dark theme in a lit room.

The worst thing I have seen a dev do?

- Have all the APIs work without an access token for our main product which handles ~10k requests a day.
- Calling our architecture secure in the crucial investor meeting and being 'confident' that our database can not be compromised. No wonder we did not get funded.

Copy and paste a piece of code from stackoverflow without having the trouble to understand the code

Refusing to escape user input in shell commands because "it's the responsibility of the user to insert safe input".

Had a coworker who made an export program, which should run one time every 24 hours and create and export some files.

He made it with a timer, that ran 24 hours before doing anything. Which meant that when he made changes to the program, he would have to wait f***ing 24 hours to see the new result.

I promised a friend to have a look over his dads website to add a small blog. No big deal, I've got it on my drive, can reuse it just need to adapt it to the environment.

I take a look at what I'm working with and I see the most terrifying piece of "Please, take my data" code I could possibly imagine (And I've seen passwords, in plain text in a script tag). I quote "function queryDB(mode, val) {
var query=" ";
if(mode==="findProd")
query="Select * from Products where ProdNam=" +val;
... (same shit for different cases)
sendQuery(query) ;
}

He literally built the query on the client side sent it to a php script (without validation) and inserted it into the database.
You could literally call window.sendQuery with any sql query and get the result printed into the console.
And other than the plain text passwords guy that wasn't some kid someone knew, this was a "Webdesign" Agency.
Now I took the entire thing offline, called my friends dad, explained it to him and try to sort this out. I would not charge a good friends father but that hack will get a quite hefty bill since my hourly rate just tripled.

And the worst thing : If I publicly name that asshole or warn the people in his portfolio I can, according to Google, be sued. (But, and I assume thats vague enough not to count as bad mouthing, if anyone of you has a customer from Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany with a preexisting page, please have a look at the database interface)
I will call that agency tomorrow, ask for a detailed explanation for why they apparently let trained monkeys write their code and anonymously warn everyone in their portfolio about those flaws...

I don't know if I'm cursed or if there are just that many bad devs but it seems that once a year I have to stumble over some "mistakes" that make me question my sanity.

I've been creating a game in Unity and I made sure to tell all my friends, but now every other day when I see them they ask me if they can play it. It gets a bit old, I try to explain this is a very long-term project and there's nothing to play until it's almost complete. Only a few of them get the memo.

Take a shit on someone’s pizza and then closed the lid over and left it on their desk.

Coworker Asks me for every little thing in the code 😑

He literally keeps asking me until I've written all the code for him and this goes on all day.

I really don't have a problem with helping him but he literally doesn't know anything (even the basic stuff) and is just getting code from other people and when I went on a holiday (3 days) he didn't do anything like literally no progress at all.

And yet he still gets paid more than me because I'm still a student 😥

Honestly I'm so done with this bullshit and I can't even get a job at a big company because apparently students are not dependable at all even if I do a better job than most devs who are 'years count' people where they barely knew anything and just do the job out of habit...

that fucking fellow dev who knows nothing about what he's doing yet makes it look like he's doing something critical -_-

Cry and panic because they don't know the required technology to complete the task.

(We all go through this. Some people just cannot contain their emotions though).

Constantly touching the display of my laptop, or any display for that matter.

It drives me up a fucking wall.

1. None of these devices support touch
2. You can point the thing out with your finger without touching the glass / plastic. Or just use my damn mouse.
3. Seeing the smears all over my screen is annoying as hell. I always find a new smudge and it's irritating.

Push code via FTP, even when GIT was being used for the project.

Unit tests that do not test anything, even no assertions at all in some of them.

Worst thing I’ve seen another developer do?

Asking a simple question before trying to google the answer.

Typing "vim" instead of "vi"
Typing with 25wpm by looking at keyboard
Using mouse for copy/paste

Now this looks stupid already, but here is the kicker: by "partially hydrated cursor" i mean that once every page size an sql query is ran to get the next page content. This code is put in an event handler, executed once every time a file is uploaded in a dms where files get uploaded by the thousand.

To sum things up, this simple snippet achieves triple dipping:
* waste time on useless sql queries
* waste cpu on useless iterations
* waste disk space on useless logs

Icing on the cake, the author of this piece of shit was complaining about the overall slowness of the process.
Needless to say that when I stumbled on this, both internal *and* external screaming ensued...

Removed his shoes and walked around in the office on his socks. Not that bad, really, until you factor in the smell. It was nauseating. HAHA

Coding in Verdana.

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? So many things. Here is another...

A developer purposely forged international shipping documents by 'hard-coding' data to get around international shipping restrictions (ex. we can't sell 'Widgets' to Germany...so under the category he would replace the value with 'light bulb'). He was 'under pressure' to make keep the money rolling in no matter what.

We were eventually 'caught', fined over $300,000 (which was better than the $10,000 per offense and we had thousands of offenses).

For this major frack-up, 'Rob' was promoted to manager of the International department, got to travel (including his wife) to several European countries, and eventually obtained a company-paid MBA degree.

'Rob' liked to joke about how he would sometimes have to pinch himself how lucky he was by working for such stupid people (yes, he used the word 'stupid') and how gullible government investigators were.
"All I had to do was say 'its a bug in Windows' or some other kind of nonsense and they believed me."

'Rob' quit 3 months after receiving his MBA degree (again, 100% company paid) and the international department closed due to some potential illegal activity.

Wrap anything more than two lines into another function. Reading such code makes your brain stack overflow.

I’ve met several...

Simultaneously opening ssh sessions to test and production system, finally stopping the application in the factory.

It was me.

He spent a week learning to code (c#) then decided he was good enough to write the next big FPS.

The result was about as bad as you'd expect.

I worked at a startup that indulged in pair programming thing. Where as a junior, you'd be partnered with a senior developer.

My mentor, always insisted on having shortest variable names possible, so that the "size of codebase" will be very small.

It was a nightmare going through his code and understanding what's he's done. Best part, no comments as well.

In a way it has primed me to go through any codebase possible.

rm -rf /
Without going into directory

Once had a teammate who added
// @formatter:off (eclipse)

at the beginning of nearly each class, to make sure my auto-format on save does not ruin his nice formatting

as i usually let eclipse take care of this, i commited unformatted code by mistake

so he formatted my code by hand

Nested nested if statements!!!
😡😡😡😡😡😡

He tried to "npm install" a maven project.

Prefix variables with his name, andy1, andy2, andy3. Hilarious naming scheme

Forgotten password was sending the password in plain text to email.

Well that would probably be my classmate. He sucks at programming but I wanted him to do at least something. So I dictated him code he should simply type down: "for ( blah foo colon foos ) { ..." And he's like "for ( blah foo .. foos ) {". Colon means " Doppelpunkt" in German which means "double dot" if translated literally. So he wrote ".." instead of ":".

Fuck meh

Worst thing? Absuse LINQ and not in a fun sexy way.

Entity framework > check.
LINQ query > check.
Standard IEnunerable magic > check

The developer had decided that it would be a good idea to thread the enumerable all over the place and collapse it anytime they wanted access to the data.

I know it’s a rookie mistake a lot of people make, but it was some pretty core data that ended up being used all over the place, so it was a nightmare to correct and it really impacted performance.

Needless to say they felt very silly when we explained how LINQ was deferred.

Copy code from a word document because "his PDF wouldn't open" 😭

Use a fucking string to store an int just to use a switch on the value.

Putting the API keys, secrets and passwords in the code and pushing it to git.

Creating a $__this variable in global scope in a shitty PHP application. Worst part was, he wrote it in my mother language ($__bu). Fuck that.

Not using the ide's autocompletion and always writing out the whole goddamn names.

Fetching object from db using id of the already obtained object
.get(pk=self.pk)

Every time I think I've seen the worst there's someone to prove me wrong...

GRANT ALL ON ALL TABLES/SEQUENCES
To web user on production

if (x == 1) y = 1;
else y = x;

loop through a collection and get 'few' relations using ORM - 1000s of queries and not a single join - but don't worry, "The ITs will just add more RAM and some CPU cores to the server"

4th day off and I already miss this

Physically copy the git project's folder, change his terminals directory into it to test then move the files he edited to the original folder and commit back.

At least it's split out?

You know what a fucking good place for 1000s of mp4s, pdfs, doc files, exes and svgs is? Yeah, the bloddy SVN,which mirrors to git.
And how about a ibm websphere install zip with tiny 1.3gb?
And of cause you store your fuckin perl and Shellscripts, that have been written by a plain lunatic and that are responsible for installing the crap in the repo.
What? One repo for one component? Nah, cramp like 150 different projects into on repo.
And the most important scripts have to be kept unversionized ... For reasons.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg of shit.
Btw. websphere ships its own apache2.2 and its own security lib and its own openssl compilation, with ibm java ... Filesystem hierarchy standard? Dafuq? If you want to find something it better be like where is waldo - right, IBM? And command arguements? Man pages, usable documentation, usable deployment? How did any of this ever seem like a good idea to anyone?
Go get a koloscopy with a submarine periscope, IBM.

My last boss insisted on using tables instead of divs and then asked me to make it responsive (every damn time). Also, functions that were over 10k of lines.

A coworker created several WinForms-Tools because it was "more comfy" than learning XAML which we usually use for all our sw clients.

Now that these tools are relevant for our infrastructure and some even for the product itself they have to be maintained by others as well.
Note: he tried to use OOP but the result is more like a complete new style of programing . Processes, objects and external scripts in the mix.

Mainreason why noone could know about it: the product manager used him as kind of private dev for some hours a week. No reviews, barely documentation... Now we decided that developing the tools from the scratch is more time and cost efficient.
What a mess...

Implementing every single function again.

My IT-teacher has a website. Aside from it looking like from 1980 (which is ok), he has a "security js Mail decryption":
In his page there is a <script> with a simple yet custom de/encrypt function. Then his E-Mail is an <a href="javascript:mailto:function('rubberish173848'>private email</a>. (Or something like that)

You can just run this link (open email app and read it) or use the same function and same href in the browser console and read it. It sounds so stupid.

(Yet I figured out he probably doesn't want bots to spam his mail, so maybe I am stupid)

I'm starting a freelance project and the guy who is working on the backend refuses to use git because all the files sync to his computer from the server

Worst thing I’ve seen other Dev do?

Asking someone else to do the documentation for APIs he/she wrote...

Myself, using inline-css.
Because html emails.

They suck big time.

A colleague pushed a commit to our git where he just add one whitespace between if statement and curly braces -_- Applause!

! Worst thing another dev did in our NodeJS code.

1. No indentation. Literally.
2. A single function in a module worth 1000 lines. I'm not even kidding. No breaking into smaller functions. Just a large rock with a lot of js mess scribbled.
3. No comments at all
4. Sending stray values to promises which were not required at all.
5. No jsdoc. Using camelCase and uppercase interchangeably.

No indents, except a couple of random senseless ones here and there, nightmare! And I had to debug it😖

Putting every file, even SHADER CACHES (that huge cyan flower here (this illustration was made with "gource"), yes, every of those tiny little dots is a file) or even complete libraries into their git repository.

A remote SQLite database where huge blobs of JSON created by python’s pickle module were stored in a single cell. These blobs include things that should have been many-to-many, like users and competitions. This database (including the pickled python objects) was queried by API calls from an iOS app.

Beat that...!

Worst mistake ever :
Didn't care for changing environment while pip or apt, always did sudo for no reason.

One day installed Conda and unity. Didn't realise it changed everything to python3-gi. Everything fucked up.

Tried to fix by started removing Conda removed gnome*, lost GUI.

For first time worked on tty, after a 6 hour redbull session. Got back the system working.

First thing then done is learn to install in virtual and local environments.

Code on paper before rewriting the code on a computer

Using Notepad as an IDE for Java. He was seriously messed up.

Create a copy of a huge method, I mean a complete fucking copy of a huge method, to change one small piece just because the behavior needs to be different in his specific case. Then, when the method is called, put an "if is my case, call my fucking copy".

Maintenance? What's that?