Programming perls I encountered myself over the years. Epic mistakes to remember. Things I've seen that cannot be unseen.

WallOfShame.md

Wall of shame

Introduction

Throughout life as a software developer you see a lot of gems. Code gems.

Things that are well done, things that are not well done and things that are just plain wrong.

Programming perls I encountered myself over the years. Mainly the bad ones. Epic mistakes to remember. Things I've seen that cannot be unseen.

Epic Ones

• thread sleeps 10ms to "prevent" concurrency issues

• our logic code implemented on 3rd party JavaScript files (non-minified js dependencies, such as from npm and such)

• our logic code implemented on MINIFIED JavaScript files, deployed live, not committed anywhere
  noticed this after we deployed a new version live and it broke.
  then we make a diff with the backup files.
  then we thanked god for inventing backup files

• add *.orig to git ignore (orig files are internal git files for resolving conflicts)

• Test URLs hard-coded on payment DLLs
  Found this out after decompiling the DLL from live, while investigating a ticket about missing payments

• jira ticket FOO-123
  Title: "Implement Everything"
  Description: "none"
  Assignee: "Jesus" (a guy named jesus actually worked there)

• because someone with permissions to create a new repo took several months to do so, the devs emailed each other with the project zip, and locally merged stuff

"Normal" Ones

• hard coded configuration, URLs, passwords, user names, etc

• committed code that does not compile

• committed code that never gets executed

• unit test cases that don't compile because someone deleted some classes without re-running the tests

• unit test cases with api calls, http calls, DB interaction, ...
  you name it! they've got it tested!

• committed projects with local disk references and those reference files not committed

• have server side XSLT generating front end HTML (annotated with the CSS and all)

• have one HTTP redirect file with 8k+ lines

• .bak files on source control

• copy-paste source control: where several versions of the file are kept and committed
  example: foo1.a, foo2.a, ... or barDec.a, barOct.a, ...

• 'relational' DB's WHITHOUT FK
  DB tables with INT type column and no FK constrains for other table's IDs
  but only for some tables, because its more fun this way

• static all the things
  projects where most classes and methods are static

• source code files where the IDE tells you:
  "sup, dog! I'm going to turn intellisense off now. kthxbye!"
  (+10K lines on single class)

• code on DB tables
  html "templates" that code loads and returns to the browser
  binary DLLs, dynamically loaded (a personal favorite)

We will build our own wheels

• custom encryption algorithm
  because we dont store plain text passwords!

• custom logging "framework", with File.Open()