did you ever have to maintain a code that is so bad that it makes you physically ill to look at it? i feel like I've seen an eldritch horror

I did. the only thing my mind was : this thing has to be rewritten the right way, now that all changes look permanent, but noo, that stubborn guy wont budge, just keep adding new shits and it will be ok. I gave up in the end and just left

Yes, often my own code I've written several years ago...

I worked about 6 months at my uni's student union. With another CS undergrad we maintained the WordPress site and a set of Power Automate flows which were responsible for all non-critical business logic. Critical processes were handled by a SharePoint server and a dotnet solution "maintained" by our manager who was a senior and therefore earned over half the total IT budget for essentially just preventing us from solving problems.

After I left my colleague managed to get him fired and get access to the servers. Apparently the code for the dotnet solution was stored on a ramdisk so for the last several years upgrades were applied to the decompiled executable.

I never ranted about this job because it's exhausting to even think about it and I think my colleague is more qualified to tell the tales so I rather try to get him to join devrant.

@lorentz wow, it's 1 thing to work on live directly, but ramdisk to skip the compiling, that's just woow

@lorentz yeah bring him on, now I wanna read all about it. sounds like real fun =]

@We3D no I mean it was originally stored on a ramdisk so it was lost many years ago and the solution was to decompile the executable and then continue on without ever bothering to factor the code which was autogenerated from dotnet bytecode.

@lorentz oh, I see, not much fun then, circumstances...sooner or later it will come to the point of the Big Rewrite. Not every legacy code is meant to live forever, like not every brilliant piece of code too...the entropy does not know mercy

@lorentz i have to maintain a form that changes every month basically because no one makes up their fucking mind about it. the code is bs from start to finish. it's a 1100 html with js on the body. there's dynamic html and css in jquery. there are two of the same html twice for creation and edit (don't ask me why) and it's full of jinja2 nonsense. the BE has a lot of paths leading to the same bloated function and the way the form is generated is stupid. i wanna gouge out my eyes every time i have to do something in it

@darksideofyay that reads like mental abuse....

codethulhu is my daily bread for some years.

but at least, we're now in the process of replacing it, step by step. cutting of one eldritch appendage after the other.

Just have a look at my PLC rants. Shit was designed in the 90's and bandaided ever since!

Yes, this is my own code, and I hope this horror will stop someday.

@tosensei i started to face the beast last friday, by breaking the paths into post and get (they were the same function). it's too many layers of nonsense, my head hurts every time

@darksideofyay i started by deleting a few _hundred_ megabytes worth of binary dependencies that haven't been used for years before i even saw the project, but still were checked. into. version. control. even though they were available as nuget packages.

wait.

no.

i started by moving the project from TFVC to gitlab.

There is good code?

Lol, you guys are nuts.