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Yesterday I had to modify a python script that was written by the previous dev,
There was no documentation to understand the code, I had to read 10 files almost 900 line each, after a looooooooooong 7 hours, at the top of one of the scripts, the author name was same as mine
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂6 -
Real Story:
Manager: You have to add an extra section in the app to show more details.
Me: We are already showing so many unnecessary details. These changes are not required.
Manager: No !! You have to do it.
Me : Ok !!! So why can't we show it in the section where we are showing the other details. Why make a separate section for it.
Manager : No !! It won't be clearly visible to the user. Just do it.
So I added another section to show useless information that we are already showing it f**king everywhere else in the app.
So I released a new apk next day with the added features.
In meeting, our CTO goes through the app and ask manager....
" Why we have added an extra section for showing same details that we are showing everywhere else ???
Who approved this ?? This is nonsense !!! "
Here comes the fun part.
Manager : I don't know. I didn't ask for it. These changes were not there earlier.
And ask me.
"Who told you to make these changes ? "
I am like... F***k man you a***ole told me to do it even when i told you it will be nonsense.12 -
Large comment block at the top of the file, commenting explicit line numbers, as in: "line 365: copy to a new image".
Only everytime the comment block grew, the line numbers got more and more off. -_-4 -
On my first day at work realising that I would be working on a code base with 1.5 million+ lines of code and the only documentation is half a paragraph some guy wrote the day before he left 😑3
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IT Requests:
"I need (insert vague IT related need), because otherwise we can't do our job."
- What have you been doing up until now?3 -
Day 1 at internship:
Manager: Can you get this RFID tracking system working? We have the full source we just need it installed.
Me: Sure thing, shouldn't take too long if it's a working system.
Me: (opens VS project)
Code is a sprawling abyss devoid of any intelligible structure, commented with broken one-liners which serve only to annotate method names.
In Mandarin.
For the record the system was broken, took me several weeks to track down all the issues.4 -
Last year we were given an app to patch that was completely in Arabic (including the documentation). We had a tight deadline to get the app fixed so we paid for a big company to translate the Word document we'd be given.
After 2 weeks we were given the translated documentation only to find it was select recipes from an Egyptian cooking book.1 -
When the method name was too long and it's like describing the entire function.
Like getUserByUserIdOrderByAgeAndHaveAtLeastOneChild ()
:)2 -
PayPal.
Found a nice method that does what you want? DEPRECATED.
Finally got that adaptive payment workflow all figured out? BREAKING CHANGES.
Want to use that new feature with your langs library? UNSUPPORTED.
Braintree isn't much better.7 -
PM, on kickoff meeting: good code speaks for itself, need no documentation
PM, on UAT day: how does this features work, where is the documentation for it?
Dev: Just do me a favor and go fuck yourself.1 -
Tutorials w examples that don't even work. Would run into these all the time back in my Flash days, so frustrating.2
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This is documentation at a noob-program level. We had this one teacher, who shall remain unnamed, who used single letter variable names everywhere, who couldn't understand his own programs when they were shown to him.
PS - The picture attached is supposed to be an implementation of Kruskal's algorithm. Don't ask me what the variables mean.
14 -
British company supplied with Ukrainian documentation for the wrong application. Needless to say it was in Russian.1
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i once ran into this:
// magic part starts here, do not touch
and this:
// i know, and i'm sorry
in legacy code. needless to say, i prefer undocumented, well-written code to all that followed1 -
Most hated documentation?
W3Cschools in its entirety
There is even a Chrome extension to leave it out of the search results :D9 -
Amazon API ... seriously...this thing is documented over 3 different pdfs in 3 different locations with 3 different requestpattern, 2 different answerpattern and requestthrottling per minute and per hour takes the rest...and then you just do basic stuff e.g. request all orders that were refunded by amazon... who the hell designed this mess?4
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At my job there is little to none documentation of the software. Software is from 2000 and updated since...
Imagine the features no one knows about.4 -
Our documentation is currently stored in a VM image after the host died, meaning we have no access to anything - good times!5
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The problem being a dev at a big company (around 1000 devs) with huge codebase (I mean huge, tens of thousands of modules, if not millions) is that, as many hands touch the code of a project and deadlines are always short, not everyone care about changing the documentation afterwards.
This translates to double the work everytime you need to fix a bug or something as you have to quickly reverse engineer the modules to understand it - the documentation often reflects an old version and it messes things up much more than it helps you out.4 -
The other side of the gun: are you allowed to write proper documentation? Most of the time, I'm not.4
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Worst documentation I've dealt with? The non-existent one.
"Is there any documentation for this?" "Nope." "..." -
Worst documentation is the one so confusing and poorly written that even no documentation would have been better. And more than small projects, large corporations who don't give a fuck *ahem* Oracle *ahem* are guilty of this3
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"Specs are out of date at time of writing. Basic premise of how this works: {link}"
and link goes to a 4041 -
Found file called 'bullshit' in my work folder with list of packages and no comment whatsoever. I wonder what did my past self wanted to do with those packages... What was this list for? Sounds important. And back then (month ago) I thought it was obvious. Sometimes I wonder what games is my past self playing with me...1
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Our team had a brilliant engineer, he made a tool that would convert IBM Assembler code to C, comments included. the comments are the assembler code. bleh
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fucking kidding me? go to google or facebook's offical documentation, they are carfted perfectly not to work4
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exactly two years back I joined my current company, it is spanish company and I speak only english. each document that was there in the welcome kit was in spanish, including design and architecture documents. also coding guidelines. it was a night mare as comments in the code were also in spanish. it took me three days to come to terms with reality.8
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Documentation? That's the stuff of dreams for us.
Instead we have ancient code written by people who have long left / forgotten with no idea what the cryptic mess they left behind does. -
In a helper for a testing environment there was a flag called CheckLayoutConf. The documentation stated: if set checks if the layout configuration is valid and fixes it. I was curious about the validation and fixing mechanisms, so I looked into the code. But if the flag is set, then the layout configuration is just deleted, so in the next start of the program a new default layout configuration is created. Nice "validation" and "fixing" you for there, I thought to myself.
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Found this gem when trying to figure out what transclusion is in Angular. Didn't we all learn in like, 3rd grade not to use a form of the same word in a word's definition?
"ngTransclude
- directive in module ng
Directive that marks the insertion point for the transcluded DOM of the nearest parent directive that uses transclusion."1 -
the worst documentation I've dealt with was (sadly) some I wrote myself.
We had a project - build with no maintenance agreement attached. so I half-assed the docs and tests... a year after launch we sign a support agreement and I'm struggling to figure out how the damn thing works! -
When I started this job 4 months ago, I was given a grace period of a week to "get into the groove of the code". I asked the lead dev where on pulse (intranet) the documentation was, he laughed and then resumed what he was doing. I shrugged it off and continued scrolling through the code.
A week later, working on a story, I'm stuck at why a particular function exists. I say "it would be nice if there was documentation, where is that anyway?". Lead dev replies, "one thing you should know about this company, there is no documentation unless it's API related".
Last month's retro, 80% of our (mine and lead dev) problems were related to a lack of kt, I laughed.3 -
worst documentation ever => Samsung TV app documentation.
it is so rare that you find a function that actually works. sometimes you find a description about the function but it is in korean language. -
Just use proper variable name and class architecture and header file and viola you don't need documentation.
In the worst case to understand class heirchy use the graphviz of doxygen and you are done.7 -
A comment on a handler function that simply says //WTF IS THIS?!
this might be because the last line of the function is:
return @"CHUCK TESTA";1 -
The project with the worst documentation is always my own. I always come back to a project and have no idea what anything does.1
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A project that is used across our company with multiple clients. It's huge, over 2million lines of code and 116 separate projects. Not a single piece of documentation. Took me three weeks to track down where the authentication occurred with visual debugging and mapping tools.2
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By far, the worst docs I've read was for a library I used to use for almost every project. I didn't really have to look at the docs because I knew the ins and outs of it. Time went by and I stopped using the library. I came back to a project that used that library, and I had the hardest time figuring out what was going on.
It was a library I wrote :/
I got much better at documentation after that. I started doing DDD (Document Driven Development) because many developer's first experiences with libraries are with the documentation. It allowed me to interact with my library before I even started development. -
The worst is on an ATM Card,
"This ATM card is property of the bank if found please return it"
No place to explain how to use it2 -
I remember on my first project which was Angular 1.* there was a file in the frontends repo called ShimOfShame.
The first few lines of that file was a comment apologising for its existence.
"My soul cries everytime i add a line to this file"5 -
the worst project without without documentation I had to work with was a huge web 1.0 webapp that had been compiled / uglified into a huge blob of javascript with meaningless variable- and function names that were no longer than 3 characters. needless to say, the original source code was gone and the original author as well. Spent weeks figuring out where to implement the new feature, while it could have been a few hours of work.1
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Worst documentation was a document made for a client's api that wasn't updated, they had to send us pretty much everything by mail so we could integrate it
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I hate it when someone says ist all documented, but its just a bunch of old crappy word documents with mostly unusable information in it...
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worst documentation.. OpenCV.
About half of the features I've used are not even mentioned in the documentation. The worst part is that at first look the website looks neat and well maintained but in reality it is missing a lot of usefull info. And some of it is plain jibberish.3 -
Not really documentation, but actually the user manual for a corporate online ebanking system for dealing with EPF/ETF. The instructions were very very vague, and when we called the bank for clarification, they said that some of the stuff in the manual was outdated/not relevant anymore. Like what the fuck man?
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I once worked on a project with 3 specification documents; a word document with numbered points describing every feature inadequately, a UI specification with mocked up screenshots in a badly-versioned wiki, and a user manual which had already been produced by an overzealous marketing department.
Of course they all contradicted each other :D -
Worst documentation I have ever dealt with is my own. I have gone back to programs, looked at it, and went, what the heck is even this. I've broken business critical programs just because I didn't know the extent of what I was changing. I've gotten better, because of events like that. OMG!!!!
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Currently introducing two coworkers to 180 kloc written by my predecessor over 5+ years time with tons of magic constants. I've been on the project for 5 months and don't know anything. They asked for the documentation and I gave them the look.
feelsbadman.jpg -
I backed this Kickstarter project for a programmable E-ink display called "Displio". The documentation is about 40 lines and is basically just a list of globals without any explanation followed by a link to MomentJS docs. worst of all you have to modify the page with an inspector to see it all.
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Worst documentation experience: reading an 500+ page ISA document where the author (a so-called computer architect) kept confusing the term 'op-code,' and 'instruction.' When I asked for a consistent definition he flamed the shit out of me. My boss sided with him.
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When the docs are on a different Pompey Pirates floppy that you didn't copy at the monthly computer club.1
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The worst documentation I've ever seen:
/*******************************************
$NAME CODE UPDATE
********************************************/
// CALCULATIONS
Followed by a dozen of of poorly named functions for complex calculations, with no comments whatsoever (save for the commented out debug statements) -
Haas cnc machines have an sdk... Not only did it not work and crashed the machines, but most of the documentation was "to be added"...
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SharePoint: Designer is discontinued but they haven't released an alternative method of creating custom workflows...
Also, SharePoint only shows correlation ids, which you'd have to check the logs to see what the error was (no description or error code for user): SharePoint Online doesn't split their logs by client... so they can't give clients access to the logs even if they wanted too. Only option is to contact their support... seems overkill when the error may be a user trying to upload a document with the same name.1 -
When the only comments in your team's entire project is for code that doesn't work, as if everyone's backspace key broke simultaneously
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it changes every couple of weeks, the universe keeps creating bigger and better idiots. but right now the last documentation was apache Mina sshd and jgit. I eventually figured out that git receive had to be threaded to work but that should have been in the docs
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few years ago... Setting up Ellucian's mobile product only to find out they left out where to put the config file (it's not in the typical App_Data directory or root of WAR file) it's in a hard coded spot on the C drive (C:\ellucianmobile\...groovy)
Below is the change request their support team put in to update the documentation...
Their documentation seems to be a bit spotty at times, almost as if they want you to have to pay their support / consultants to setup the products you bought from them
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The worst documentation is always my own. Or when you & some friends are hacking a weekend project together :(
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I took over an application that consisted of 4 MSSQL (2005 at the time) databases, hundreds of tables, thousands of stored procedures, maybe a 1/4 of them actual still being used, external links to more than 20 other databases (MSSQL, Oracle and DB2) which all ran from a single "master" stored proc that was kicked off nightly by scheduled job.
The existing documentation consisted of a single word document, about three pages long, describing how to set up the application... on the Sql Server 6 server it had been originally created on two generations ago. -
I was trying to move a Zend app from one server to another once. there were actually 3 apps running on 2 different servers, an idle rabbit server, and the code in prod was vastly different than what was on the repo. the docs the previous dev wrote were literally the about pages for the tech used.
I remember he had a Windows server running something... all the docs said was "for long processes".... there wasn't a single process ever running on it. -
!rant
Thanks to the urllib documentation wich I find well written in opposition to the Beautifulsoup one
My script finally fucking WORKS
Not a rant sorry but I'm so glad I can finally sleep better thanks to it that I had to mention it -
Worst documentation I've dealt with? The documentation I didn't write. Lesson learned? There's always time to document, for your own sanity, and the sanity of anyone who has to maintain your work.2
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So the project I'm working on atm and ranted about a couple of days ago... There is absolutely no documentation and the code is at least ten years old.
At least I can contact the old dev, but he's slower at replying, than reading the code through and figuring it out 😐1 -
For the little experience I had with developing a simple Android app (that may or may not see the light of day), I find that of you want to wing it on the go on your first app ever you're gonna have a bad time.
Any android-related doc will make you have even more questions. it's like they're teasing you with a piece of candy and then you have to bow to the gods of googling and stackoverflow.
I refer to the ArcGIS, facebook (sign-in and requests), and even the android developer page does not answer everything a beginner needs to know.
Is it just me because I'm a n00b? Or did anyone else have the same experience? Will I ever get to the day where I can code an Android app without struggle? -
Enterprise software vendor with scarce, outdated and useless documentation. Claimed 'we are working on it' - they weren't. I had to write 75 page admin and user guides.
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unigine sim engine has the worst documentation i've ever seen. it was written in bad english, occasionally did not follow a word convention (i.e. functions doing analogous work used different keywords), most items were just reiterations of function names (made up example for clarification: getAngularVelocity(): gets angular velocity...). i had to use it for my first ever job, and had to learn in from scratch, mostly by trial and error. it's been months since i switched jobs, and they were rolling a version 2 when i left, i hope they improved on their docs.
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I once did this project with Apache Tika, which also has a batch module to add concurrency (Tika by itself is not thread-safe).
However, there is maybe 2 pages of documentation which don't explain any of the classes etc, and no javadoc, so I had to figure everything out through trial and error. At the end it still threw an error but magically worked. Turns out it was not fast enough anyway. -
Worst documentation I've ran into so far are the ones that end up providing me with more questions than answers.
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The worst documentation has to be Veritas Backup Exec. The company bought it from Symantec, and now it's a very awkward mesh of 404'd links, ancient articles and recently made articles.1
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BeautifulSoup (python module) doc is a single block of text which has an everlasting scrolling and hard to read. Examples are ok, but come on, we're devs, not text parsers. We need clear, clean and visual documentation. I neither like the organization of the Facebook API docs. It was a nightmare to build my first simple app. There are tons of this kind of messy, almost unreadable and confusing docs. It's strange, but usually these kind of docs are related to open source projects. Long life to markdown and github.4
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i think sl4a .
I needed 3 minutes to do something in vbs and it's been 12 hours since I am searching how am i supposed to do the same thing on android -
a) No documentation. At least you know from the start where you are.
b) Light documentation. At least you might have an API reference or something
c) Badly translated but complex documentation. Had this when I worked for a car manufacturer. Docs were badly translated and actually gave you a dangerously wrong or opposite description of what things really did. It was mental! -
When the documentation consists only out of JavaDoc boilerplate, providing exactly NO additional information and just clutters the code.
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Minecraft modding, in general, is badly documented. The documentation for the major modding APIs, for instance, is probably SOMEWHERE, but it's hard to find and often outdated. I only found one decent-looking updated tutorial, and that didn't contain most of the information I wanted. I really don't understand how the major mod makers actually manage it.5
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Client purchases platform from large tech company. Needs to be able to add custom CSS and JS. Spend weeks combing through sites looking for documentation. Compile my own from my own trial and error, a half ass wiki, and forums.
Client's platform is years out of date. -
/**
* Class TransactionModel
*
* @codeCoverageIgnore
*/
public class EtlNotifyRepository extends DatabaseRepository implements EtlNotifyInterface
{ ... }
Copy/pasting doc ain't good D:2 -
PostUserStreamPost
Action: post user stream post
Fields: All fields are required
A: which fields?
B: no, they are not all required -
Was working as the only frontend developer ona project having 4 "senior" developers. They use Laravel to make an API feeding the angular app.
Why the documentation sucked?
Half the API call params where missing, and not one time did I come across an example stating that the API expects a boolean only to find out 20 minutes later that they mean int 1 or 0 not true or false. Best part however was sending arrays in POST by sending the elements as comma separated values (e1,e2,e3...). Oh and not documentation but while at it a rant... There are other response codes except 200 for fucks sake -
The worst documentation had to be students work in the sophomore programming course I was a TA for in college.
What was even more tragic was the actual code, but that's what you get for reading Facebook when you are in class. -
No documentation available. Often has to try to identify the dev, and then get the best of his memory guidance by phone.
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I used to write many payment gateways integrations, so I had to work with many poorly written docs.
I didn't like Robokassa, QuickPay and Payza
On the other hand, I liked PayPal because of ease and clarity, Authorize.net, Stripe -
Obviously worst documentation is no documentation at all when having to interface with something proprietary (source code is kind of documentation). When you have to dump exported symbols and guess what could it do and how to call it. Luckily too old (and hopefully wise) for it now, sticking to opensource.
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Integration toolkit between two enterprise products , specs say specifically 32 bit drivers while after 3 days of struggle they worked with 64 bit ones 😕
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