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.

90s devs: "Did you know about GOTO/CONTINUE for control flow? it's so convenient and powerful!"

00s devs: "GOTO is an antipattern. But did you know about try/catch? You can use it for control flow, just write a lot of exception classes, it's so powerful!"

10s devs: "Using exception blocks for generic control flow is an antipattern. But have you heard about event listeners and observer patterns? It's so powerful!"

Developers are so good at repackaging and reselling square wheels by giving them fresh, impressive sounding names.

😡

Not really tech, but...

I used to handwrite a lot of fiction in several notebooks that I kept over the years. House went through a bad flood in 2013, basement where the notebooks were stored got full up, lost all the notebooks 😭

Now I don't even have a basement

I studied ancient languages, because of corruption in my home country, I couldn't find any place in academy although my scores were above 90%. Moved to another country and taught myself web development. Naturally in time I lost almost all my knowledge of Latin, Ancient Greek, the whole ancient literature, history, philosophy and culture (everything from historical evolution of tremmas in letter i in ancient Greek to honey fish recipe in ancient Rome cousine). I'm super happy with Webdev tho but I think that also counts as data loss.

I'm thinking abounds buying Sublime-Text, is worth the money?