Everyone always says the previous developer was crap, sometimes you're right

This code review gave me eye cancer.

So, first of all, let me apologize to anyone impacted by eye cancer, if that really is a thing... because that sounds absolutely horrible. But, believe me, this code was absolutely horrible, too.

I was asked to code review another team's script. I don't like reviewing code from other teams, as I'm pretty "intense" and a nit-picker -- my own team knows and expects this, but I tend to really piss off other people who don't expect my level of input on "what I really think" about their code...

So, I get this script to review. It's over 200 lines of bash (so right away, it's fair game for a boilerplate "this should be re-written in python" or similar reply)... but I dive in to see what they sent.

My eyes.

My eyes.

MY EYES.

So, I certainly cannot violate IP rules and post any of the actual code here (be thankful - be very thankful), but let me just say, I think it may be the worst code I've ever seen. And I've been coding and code-reviewing for upwards of 30 years now. And I've seen a LOT of bad code...

I imagine the author of this script was a rebellious teenager who found the google shell scripting style guide and screamed "YOU'RE NOT MY REAL DAD!" at it and then set out to flagrantly violate every single rule and suggestion in the most dramatic ways possible.

Then they found every other style guide they could, and violated all THOSE rules, too. Just because they were there.

Within the same script... within the SAME CODE BLOCK... 2-space indentation... 4-space indentation... 8-space indentation... TAB indentation... and (just to be complete) NO indentation (entire blocks of code within another function of conditional block, all left-justified, no indentation at all).

lowercase variable/function names, UPPERCASE names, underscore_separated_names, CamelCase names, and every permutation of those as well.

Comments? Not a single one to be found, aside from a 4-line stanza at the top, containing a brief description of that the script did and (to their shame), the name of the author. There were, however, ENTIRE BLOCKS of code commented out.

[ In the examples below, I've replaced indentation spacing with '-', as I couldn't get devrant to format the indentation in a way to suitably share my pain otherwise... ]

Within just a few lines of one another, functions defined as...

function somefunction {
----stuff
}

Another_Function() {
------------stuff
}

There were conditionals blocks in various forms, indentation be damned...

if [ ... ]; then
--stuff
fi

if [ ... ]
--then
----some_stuff
fi

if [ ... ]
then
----something
something_else
--another_thing
fi

And brilliantly un-reachable code blocks, like:

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]; then
--SOME_VAR="blah"
fi

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]
----then
----SOME_VAR="foo"
fi

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]
--then
--echo "SOME_VAR must be set"
fi

Do you remember the classic "demo" programs people used to distribute (like back in the 90s) -- where the program had no real purpose other than to demonstrate various graphics, just for the sake of demonstrating graphics techniques? Or some of those really bad photo slideshows, were the person making the slideshow used EVERY transition possible (slide, wipe, cross-fade, shapes, spins, on and on)? All just for the sake of "showing off" what they could do with the software? I honestly felt like I was looking at some kind of perverse shell-script demo, where the author was trying to use every possible style or obscure syntax possible, just to do it.

But this was PRODUCTION CODE.

There was absolutely no consistency, even within 1-2 adjacent lines. There is no way to maintain this. It's nearly impossible even understand what it's trying to do. It was just pure insanity. Lines and lines of insanity.

I picture the author of this code as some sort of hybrid hipster-artist-goth-mental-patient, chain-smoking clove cigarettes in their office, flinging their own poo at their monitor, frothing at the mouth and screaming "I CODE MY TRUTH! THIS CODE IS MY ART! IT WILL NOT CONFORM TO YOUR WORLDLY STANDARDS!"

I gave up after the first 100 lines.

Gave up.

I washed my eyes out with bleach.

Then I contacted my HR hotline to see if our medical insurance covers eye cancer.

bad code that works 👍

source: reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/

You know it's bad when Github finds it necessary to tell you your code is trash

i mean.. i know my code is bad, intellij, but u dont have to shove it in my face

I am a programmer and i have never written bad code

How it should be:
- First: solve the problem
- Second: Write your code.

How many people do:
- First: Write code
- Second: solve code problems
- Third: Adapt code with requirements
- Forth: get lost on your spaghetti code
- Sixth: make a suicide

When you finally catch the person that's been writing bad code all the time

Bad architecture causes more problems than bad code.

Future Teller: Your bad code and unhappy behavior will last till you're 30.

Me[curiously]: and after 30?

FT: You'll get used to it.

Sometimes my code is so bad that it takes an entire family to debug it.

Journalist: How would you describe bad code?
Developer: "No comment"

It’s code like this that gives me severe migraines 🤯

Has anyone ever looked over the code that they wrote like two years ago and just felt embarrassed of how bad it is?

A good programmer can get more done than 10 bad programmers, but a bad programmer's code can keep 10 good programmers busy for years.
~ Ed Weissman

good code > bad code + good comments 🤔

We all know this feeling

If you thought your legacy code was bad, this is what I'm dealing with. The below SQL is stored in a cookie on login and executed to on every further request to determine the user / privileges.

I've written a lot of bad code, seen a lot, but attached is the most recent 'worst' I've seen.
What makes the situation worse/funny is:
1. The developer's code comment.
2. Check-in passed a code review.
3. The 'legacy code' was written last week.

If marketing is trying to code... -_-

I swear I didn't know that. Am I a bad programmer? Should I quit writing code?

Story of my life...

when you had to maintain some stranger's shitty codebase, and you couldn't resist looking up his name on LinkedIn, then you found his profile which says he is a Rockstar coder

How can I un-see this 😑😑

Oh yes...

I feel a high amount of self rightiousnes

How to write bad code

So I was at work and send to another location (distribution centers) and in the lunch break my guider for that day and I started a conversation about servers etc (he appeared to do loads of stuff with that). He recommended me all those programs but I didn't recognize anything so I asked him what kinda servers he ran. He runs a lot of Windows servers. No problem for me but I told him that I am into Linux servers myself.

Guy: "Linux guy, eh? That system is considered to be so secure but in reality it's insecure as fuck!".

Me: (If he would come up with real/good arguments I am not going to argue against that by the way!) Uhm howso/why would you think that?
Guy: "Well all those script kiddies being able to execute code on your system doesn't seem that secure.".

*me thinking: okay hold on, let's ask for an explanation as that doesn't make any fucking sense 😐*

Me: "Uhm how do you mean, could you elaborate on that?"

Guy: "Well since it's open source it allows anyone to run any shit on your system that they'd like. That's why windows rocks, it doesn't let outsiders execute bad code on it.".

Seriously I am wondering where the hell he heard that. My face at that moment (internally, I didn't want to start a heated discussion): 😐 😲.

Yeah that was one weird conversation and look on open source operating systems...

"So, how bad is the current code base?"

“Don’t comment bad code—rewrite it.”
—Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plaugher

Bad code 😂

Can't fall asleep because of unfinished code...

Wake up at 03:00 AM because of nightmares about bad code...

Too tired to finish code or rewrite bad code :'(

Who encodes a whole gif inside the main CSS of a multifolder JS app without any documentation as to what it is? My university, that's who.

Oh my god please stop this kind of coding

When you're called in to fix another developer's terrible work.

I play this song every time when I check bad code

I'll never hate anyone's bad code as much as I hate my own bad code.

My CSS code in a nutshell

"...the way he has written the code, it feels nasty man. I would have done it this way..."

Fuck you and your feelings. If you think my code is bad, give justification for it. Explain the fucking reason. Stop saying it "feels" like a bad code.

Fucking tired of this mentality in most of the developers. Why is it that the moment you look at someone else's code, you feel like you would have written it better. Programming is problem solving. And you can solve a problem in couple of different way.

If the code is absolute shit, has followed no best practices then yeah, go ahead and call it a bad code. But just because you would have moved some lines here and there, that doesn't mean the other persons code is horrible.

Goddamit!

Found this in a legacy codebase at work. Can't imagine what the coder was thinking. "Just in case"?

Looking at old code is as bad as looking back at what you posted online years ago

I am that colleague that writes bad quality code

When the code is so bad, that the debugging duck hangs itself.

Me today at class, doing a group work, while suddenly I saw my colleague’s code looking very odd.

Me : “Why is your code like that?”
Her : “Like what?”
Me : “Its not spaced correctly... look its way over there”
Her : “Oh well, I just like it like that, its my style”
Me “...”

And im just like, if she post her code at SO, she wouldve been eaten alive...

if you ever feel bad or useless about your ability as a programmer, just remember that this is the kinda code i write when im tired

"We decided to use RxJava while you were on holiday, as it basically makes it impossible to write bad code."

You what now?!

....

*Looks at code*

Bloody hell.

What the duck man? I need answers, not you popping your eyes over my bad code!

Fibonacci for developers.

One Developer writes bad code and leaves. Company hires two more to fix the code and cycle continues. Now you know why software developers are in demand.

Only bad code needs documenting...

You know the code is in bad shape when you see variables starting with "get":

Integer getDataBlockSize;

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

I comment my code. Thats considered a bad practice between some coders

When the code is so bad that the only meaningful thing to do should be executing
rm -Rf *; git add -A; git commit -m "bugfix"
and then start the project again.

I want one!

bad code that works is bad code.

Writing bad code has its perks.

Whenever you are hungry you only have to write a few lines of code and you get some spaghetti

A journalist asked a programmer :-
What makes code bad ?

No comment.

Do you guys know any Github repos with really Bad C++ code?

Just wanna see if I can understand it, as a test... 🤔

I was asked by a client to code review their platform built in PHP. The platform was becoming slow and new features built by their current IT supplier broke existing features.

I gained access to the source code... One PHP file (index.php) containing about 80K lines of code... I am impressed and disgusted at the same time. 😂

Sometimes dirty code is more efficient than clean code.

If features get dropped frequently and requirements change every few days, writing best-practices, tested code is wasted time. Learned that in my first job where I thought the other devs were all bad. Until I realized their bad code pays my salary, and my clean code takes more time to develop.

This guy who earns 20% more than me wrote a method to check which string of 2 is lexicographically smaller.

public boolean isSmaller(String s1, String s2) {
String [] temp = new String[2];
temp[0] = s1;
temp[1] = s2;
Collections.sort(temp);
if (temp[0].equalsIgnoreCase(s1)) {
return true;
}
else {
return false;
}
}

So Friday afternoon is always deployment time at my company. No sure why, but it always fucks us.

Anyways, last Friday, we had this lovely deployment that was missing a key piece. On Wednesday I had tested it, sent out an email(with screenshots) saying "yo, whoever wrote this, this feature is all fucked up." Management said they would handle it.

The response email. 1(out of 20) defects I sent in were not a defect but my error. No further response, so I assume the rest were being looked into.

In a call with bossman, my manager states that the feature is fixed, so I go to check it quickly before the deployment(on Friday).

THERE IS NO FUCKING CODE CHECK-IN. THE DEV BASTARD JUST SAID THAT MY USECASE WAS WRONG, SO MY ENTIRE EMAIL WAS INVALID.

I am currently working on Saturday, as the other guy refuses to see the problem! It is blatant, and I got 3 other people to reproduce to prove I am not crazy!

On top of that, the code makes me want to vomit! I write bad code. This is like a 3rd grader who doesn't know code copy-pasted from stack overflow! There is literally if(A) then B else if(!A) then B! And a for loop which does some shit, and the line after it closes has a second for loop that iterates over the same unaltered set! Why?! On top of that, the second for loop loops until "i" is equal to length-1, then does something! Why loop???

The smartest part of him ran down his Mama's leg when it saw the DNA dad was contributing!

Don't know who is the culprit, and if you happen to see this, I am pissed. I am working on Saturday because you can't check your code or you lied on your resume to get this job, as you are not qualified! Fuck you!

I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.

I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.

We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.

The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.

We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.

It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.

Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.

But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.

I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.

But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.

Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.

They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.

I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this

Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.

I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.

But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.

... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.

This code is so bad,
If it were a bridge it would kill hunderds of people.

If it were an electric grid it would, plunge thousands of households into darkness

It is so bad,
If it were an operationsystem it would be WINDOWS

In elementary my teacher gave me bad mark, because instead of painting house in Paint, I was trying to code

Bad Java code is one thing. Bad objective-c code is like OHHHH MY GOD DUDE WTF ARE YOU DOINGGGGG

I've told the same story multiple times but the subject of "painfully incompetent co-worker" just comes up so often.

I have one coworker who never really grew out of the mindset of a college student who just took "Intro to Programming". If a problem couldn't be solved with a textbook solution, then he would waste several weeks struggling with it until eventually someone else would pick up the ticket and finish it in a couple days. And if he found a janky workaround for a problem, he'd consider that problem "solved" and never think about it again.

He lasted less than a year before he quit and went off to get a job somewhere else, leaving the rest of our team to comb through his messy code and fix it. Unfortunately, our team is mostly split across multiple projects and our processes were kind of a mess until recently, so his work was a black box of code that had never been reviewed.

I opened the box and found only despair and regret. He was using deprecated features from older versions of the language to work around language bugs that no longer existed. He overused constants to a ridiculous degree (hundreds of constants, all of which are used exactly once in the entire codebase, stored in a single mutable map variable named "values" because why not). He didn't really seem to understand DRY at all. His code threw warnings in the IDE and had weird errors that were difficult to reproduce because there was just a whole pile of race conditions.

I ended up having to take a figurative hacksaw to it, ripping out huge sections of unnecessary crap and modernizing it to use recent language features to get rid of the deprecation warnings and intermittent errors. And then I went through the same process again for every other project he'd touched.

Good riddance.

My frustrations with the industry

Bad Code

the good code you write today is the bad code you curse at tomorrow

I like PHP.

It's not as bad as its reputation. Just because it's easy to learn, does not mean it's bad. In fact, with a framework like Laravel or Zend it's not so simple and keeps the whole spaghetti code developers away, which led to the bad reputation.

The best part about being a teaching assistant in programming is the ability to bitch about bad code.

The worst part is all the bad code...

found this today...

I’ve never made any of my code open source, because I’m afraid that it’s so freaking bad someone will bash me for it, but I’m really trying my best.

This girl I don't even know much sent me this code. She is not a coder and has never written any code before by the way.

if(true)
{
temp=abhinav;
abhinav= v bad;
v bad= temp;
}

Is this what a modern day love note look like? 🤔🤔

One of my former coworkers was either completely incompetent or outright sabotaging us on purpose. After he left for a different job, I picked up the project he was working on and oh my God it's a complete shitshow. I deleted hundreds of lines of code so far, and replaced them with maybe 30-40 lines altogether. I'm probably going to delete another 400 lines this week before I get to a point where I can say it's fixed.

He defined over 150 constants, each of which was only referenced in a single location. Sometimes performing operations on those constants (with other constants) to get a result that might as well have been hard-coded anyway since every value contributing to that result was hard-coded. He used troublesome and messy workarounds for language defects that were actually fixed months before this project began. He copied code that I wrote for one such workaround, including the comment which states the workaround won't be necessary after May 2019. He did this in August, three months later.

Two weeks of work just to get the code to a point where it doesn't make my eyes bleed. Probably another week to make it stop showing ten warnings every time it builds successfully, preventing Jenkins from throwing a fit with every build. And then I can actually implement the feature I was supposed to implement last month.

If you're having a bad day, know that my friend broke my C++ code by replacing one semicolon with a Greek question mark.

I retyped the whole code before he told me. :|

"A good software developer writes good code. Better software developer deletes bad code."

Me, after using Generic types in some source code and deleting 250 lines effectively.

Bad Code Is Like Boomerang....
Eventually It Will Comeback At You... 🤨

It works.. I guess? 🤣🤣

who here has worked for a bank?

without naming names? what was the scariest thing they did, like, bad code, bad security, etc, that you had to fix

always wanted to be a fly on the wall of the devs office for a bank...

my vs code looks like having a bad trip recently.

When a senior developer changes your impeccable code and pushes their ugly indented lines with bad naming scheme without review.

*squirming in bed*
If it ain't broke don't fix it.. If it ain't broke don-WHAT THE FUCK IS "payment.needed2"??
Calm down, it's just some bad code but it works, you didn't write it, it's not your probl-WHY THE FUCK DO THE IF STATEMENTS HAVE SO MANY DUPLICATED LINES??

Sleep. Just sleep.

When a repository has more forks than stars, there might be something wrong with that software..

Not adding spaces in for statements.

ex) bad practice
for (i=0;i<10:i++)
{
//some code
}

ex) good practice
for (i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
//some code
}

All the noob jokes about "tee hee I write such bad code exdee" fucking drive me nuts.

There are absolutely such things as good codebases, in any language. By posting "tee hee funny relatable" "memes" about your shitass code you just make yourself look like a fucking idiot who excuses poor quality with "haha so relatable!" bullshit excuses.

Thank you for being the literal cancer of the industry, oversaturating the markets and making all of our managers think we're fucking idiot babies that have to be wrangled like cats in order to get a single feature out the door, devoid of rational thought or a modicum of expertise.

Fuck you. You're the problem. Be better or find another profession where slacking off is acceptable.

If I disregard all Wordpress code examples, this must have been one of the best examples of bad code. It took minutes to understand what it does.

Your code so bad even your rubber duck won't listen to that nonsense.

When you see someone else's code:

That feeling when a coworker screws up totally. doesn't accept it as their fault.

You look at the code and see so much of redundancy and bad practice galore.

You look at it for a while and think you can rewrite it from scratch. But you finally end up saying "fuck this" and feel hopeless because there is not enough time.

Hate that feeling. Hate it. Depresses.

Rule number 1 in performances debug :

It's always I/O.

If it's not IO, then the code should be REALLY bad.

When you try refactoring bad code you wrote a long time ago

After typeing this:

interface IDeviceTypeTraitPropertyPropertyDefintionMap {

I feel like I need to take my self out behind the shed, for the good of humanity...

Fuck the tests...

While working I was munching from a bowl of candy, suddenly realized my face hurt and hard to breathe. Emergency room....
I apparently ate something I'm allergic to while in a code fog.
No idea what it was yet.
Must have been bad code.

while you all have a rubber duck to explain your code I have this bad boy😎

Me when looking at someone else's code.

(Sorry for bad fps, had to get it under 5mb)

Try/Catch doesn't fix stupidty! OR BAD CODE!

Don’t comment bad code—rewrite it.

"This code really sucks"
"Well it's not that bad"
"But there is a GOTO"
"Oh"

&nbsp; - Everyone abused it to create empty space 😂

When you're too good to use the left hand side of the screen.

When you thought writing code on paper in university was bad, wait till you apply to Google and have one of your interviews writing code in Google docs.

Knockout JS.
I am not sure if the library itself is so bad or the code which I was working on was ugly. But since then I avoid anything that is related to knockout js.

Windows 10 Image viewer:

void ShowImage(string imagePath) {
Thread.Sleep(3600)
imagePath:GetImage().show = true
}

Sorry if my code is bad. But you understand what i mean xD

Code comments #1: A way to document bad code that wasn't reduced to it's essentials and thus unreadable. Bad.

Code comments #2: A way to explain for non-programmers how the code works. Wrong place.

Code comments #3: Company policy. No one really knows why, but others do that, so we better do it to. The management sucks.

Code comments #4: Because some hip methodology/guru describes how to document code. After a few years, when the methodology has been (unofficially) forgotten, everyone still comments the code the same way. The old management sucked.

Code comments 5#: For insecure programmers who want to convince them self they understand the code they've written. Maybe apply at McDo?

Code comments #6: Some programmers are apparently paid by lines of code. Possibly understandable.

// Comments, anyone?

Sometimes I think that going to jail for arson wouldn't be so bad. But other times I'm not doing code review on a Monday.

I started a project at high school 7 years ago, I had no idea what's clean code or design pattern, just learn while keep coding. I eventually stopped because my code is so terrible I cannot understand it anymore.

Now, after 1 year of working, I look back those dirty codes and think it is actually not that bad. Within hours I even fixed a bug with concurrency.

I start to think, instead of learning to how to write good code, maybe I should learn how to read bad code. That's just much more practical.

Must nearly every recently-made piece of software be terrible?

Firefox runs terribly slowly on a four-core 1.6GHz processor when given eight (8) gigabytes of RAM. Discord's user interface is awfully slow and uses unnecessary animations. Google's stuff is just falling apart; a toaster notification regarding MRO stock was recently pushed such that some markup elements of this notification were visible in the notification, the download links which are generated by Google Drive have sometimes returned error 404, and Google's software is overall sluggish and somewhat unstable. Today, an Android phone failed to update the Google Drive application... and failed to return a meaningful error message. Comprehensive manuals appear to be increasingly often not provided. Microsoft began to digest Windows after Windows XP was released.

Laziness is not virtuous.

For all computer programs, a computer program should be written such that this computer program performs well on reasonably terrible hardware... and kept simple. The UNIX philosophy is woefully underappreciated.

I feel so bad for the Devs of this app, they can't make up bullshit excuses and not bug test their code like other Devs can

Asks help from the top student in my class. Answers "I'm really bad at debugging. My code always compiles the first time" 🙃

Co-Workers. When I see their bad code and instantly know: "No, that's not the way to do it."

You're a great coder only if you can deliberately write bad code that works but no one can understand.

I'm hoping it's not just me, but whenever I'm using a website or mobile app, and see something badly designed I get very angry...

Blaming someone and giving them a lecture on a bad code/bug then realizing it's not a bug or that I fixed it incorrectly.

Friend asks you to hack another friend's Instagram "cause you know how to code, right" == bad.

Friend asks you to hack their own Instagram cause they forgot their password == bad++

I was looking at some poorly written code today in a project and I was curious to see who wrote it. I blamed it and found I had wrote it 6 months ago! smh Well... at least I know I'm getting better! I ended up refactoring it to use better code patterns.

Bad dev habit I'm trying to fix?

Code addiction.

Trying to add Google oauth to an old app on a client's request. God I hate past me.

Java's garbage collector is so bad that if it was good it would have collected all of my code!!

Programming commandment: Thou shall blame all bad code on thy comrade who has bequeathed your company!

First time I was screaming out of anger while looking at code.
I'm doing a group project in my university.
We are developing a indoor navigation Android app.
And a team mate of mine just merged this…

/*Method for help-feature.
Sets all the TouchEvents that are at least 400 ms long. This is made for all the relevant buttons or editTexts, which are seen on the mapView.
The case for mapView is needed because otherwise the other buttons, etc. wont work properly.*/

public void setButtonsForHelpDialog(){
View v = mapView;
switch (v.getId()) {
case R.id.mapview:
mapView.setOnTouchListener(…);
case R.id.buttonUp:
buttonOn.setOnTouchListener(…);
case R.id.buttonDown:
buttonDown.setOnTouchListener(…);
…
case R.id.description:
description.setOnTouchListener(…);
}}

The code is really aligned like this - no breaks. And it's even worse. There are if statements like if("constantly false var" == true). Which is highlighted by Android Studio.
This is done in a own class. The views are set via public member variables of this new class. The constant vars were added in the actual class holding the buttons and also stuff like this useless method
public void getDoStuff() {
doStuff()
}
And I could continue like this.

I never saw code this bad…
I can't even find words for it :/

just wrote this.

:D i know i will not solve this for a long time

I just hate it when a co-worker says "AS LONG AS IT WORKS. It doesn't matter how you code it as long as it outputs what the client/user wants. They don't check how you code it anyway" *facepalm*

We effin' follow standards so that it will be convenient for everybody!

Bad code is still bad code if you don't follow standards even if it works.

It's a constant battle of getting the code finished, and having it look readable. It's so easy to fall into the downward spiral of bad coding.

Reads horrible code
Opens DevRant to rant about it
Reads some stories
Ok, better mood, I can continue working now.
What was my planned rant about again? Ah, it can't be that bad.
Goes back to the code: Oh no, it is that bad...

Bad dev habit I am trying to fix: copy-pasting code without understanding

When you just need 2 points more for that rubber duck and you need the duck zo bad :/

"rubber duck why wont my code compile"
~squeek
"... "

How to deal with legacy code when you see such thing:

if function() == !!!false

1. Ctrl+A
2. Del
3. rm -rfv /

That moment when you want to stop reviewing bad coder's code. Or else, you'll go nuts.

Some days I feel like drinking to forget the bad legacy code Ive seen.

Found this beauty in the source code of visual studio code...

This fucking guy create a mess of a code, more than a spaghetti code, a clusterfuck of shit untested spaghetti code, and the project is actually getting well, our customer is getting bigger but everytime there is something to be added, its a fucking pain to add, and when something breaks, almost every thin breaks, and the shitty guy who wrote this code is quitting and its fucking up to me to clean up all the fucking mess, fucking asshole.

DOCUMENT AND TEST YOUR CODE KID, DONT BE A FUCKING SPAGHETTI PROGRAMMER

Code monkey see bad code.
Code monkey don’t say anything.
Nobody ask code monkey.
Linter see bad code too.
Nobody pay attention to linter.
Code monkey get more bananas on Thursday.
Code monkey grateful for bananas.
Maybe one day, code monkey make banana tree.

One of those "What the fuck am I doing?" moments.

We've all seen bad code in our time. The code I'm currently looking at needs to die horribly in a fire. In fact, that doesn't even seem extreme enough for this monstrosity

Yeah, this is why we don't do chaining...

!rant
"if you wrote good Code, you dont have to debug it. But if its Bad Code, you will spend 90% of your Time Talking to a Rubber Ducky"

-Me right now
(Or someone other but probably me)

My current boss and soon to be on-site boss marked me as 'God of Code'.

Is that good/normal/bad?

So I got this new job as Java developer, the people are really great but is the kind of companies that only takes care for fast results and not for code quality.

Because this I have to deal with libraries updated 4 years ago, classes with 8000 lines, methods with 500 lines, a WHOLE lot of work arounds because there is no time to really fix the issue unless it affects directly the customer (something not working or being really slow) aaand we use fucking svn.

Some of this practice's they know and encourage it (+1000 lines classes for example) and every time I try to talk about good practices in the code everyone seems so interested but there is always no time.

Sooo I will stay here for at least two years, I hope I can make a change for good in their code smells.

Me: *pushes up code that should stop bad thing from happening*
Bad thing: *doesnt happen for a few hours*

Is..is it good??? Did i fix it????? Or does the thing just randomly not happen right now??????? We will never know.

My first job and the amount of bad code I had to work with influenced my coding style a lot.
One thing is reading about bad examples. Another thing is it to maintain these bad examples.

$a = 1;
$b = 2;
echo ($a < $b) ? ($a > $b) ? 'This is totally fine' : ($a < $b) ? 'This is not ok!' : 'Perfect' : 'No problem here';

Why do people do this?!

(And I mean nested ternary ifs, not coding in PHP :P)

Come up with a bad version of flipping a bool's value. (value = !value)

I'll start with a bad way of doing it in C# (.NET):

char[] bca = boolWert.ToString();
if (bca.Length == 4 && bca[0] == 't' && bca[1] == 'r' && bca[2] == 'u' && bca[3] == 'e')
{
boolWert = !bool.Parse($"{bca[0]}{bca[1]}{bca[2]}{bca[3]}");
}
else if (bca.Length == 5 && bca[0] == 'f' && bca[1] == 'a' && bca[2] == 'l' && bca[3] == 's' && bca[4] == 'e')
{
boolWert = !bool.Parse($"{bca[0]}{bca[1]}{bca[2]}{bca[3]}{bca[4]}");
}
else throw new Exception("y e s");

If got to do some bugfixing at work today.
Looking through code:

if (x !== undefined || x !== null){

I want the person who wrote this to wear the ugliest and scratchiest christmas sweater with "i write bad code" written on it

Beings of Devrant - what makes a person a bad programmer?

Sometimes I write bad code and feels guilty about it. Am I the only one who does like that?

As a rookie programming, I wrote really bad code and didn't understand why. Now, I've improved to where I know bad code, but I continue writing studios horrible solutions. And in the end up refactoring much until I don't have energy to look at my code anymore. This although knowing what I should/shouldn't do. Shame!

When I start writing test cases for my own code.
Me: wahi hua jis ka dar tha!

Your spaghetti code is so bad that even Gordon Ramsay still has nightmares from it.

When you're reviewing code so bad it would have been easier to just write it yourself...

I can’t understand why every time I work for a multimillionaire company that sells their product to thousands of companies, when I start to debug this fucking product it crashes because of the absence of simple input checks... wtf

“Can’t divide by zero”
“Null everywhere”

Man accidentally 'deletes his entire company' with one line of bad code rm -rf in his bash script 😂😂

Good Idea: Code Reviews

Bad Idea: Code Reviews before your first sip of coffee.

I think I'm a good developer. I have pretty decent debugging skills, including pulling apart disassembled x86 and other architecture code.

I'm fascinated by how things work.

But almost everything is catered for by a library. Or has already been done.

I find it enjoyable to create a library or program myself, but get disheartened when I find some library or program that is written seemingly very well, compared to my own code. And then I start to think I'm not a good developer after all.

Sort of relates to my previous rant about repeatedly rewriting code.

Applies to me doing programming as a hobby but probably affects my code at work as well... I just can't help but think my code is probably awful compared to what someone else might write.

...then I see incredibly ugly, messy, badly written code by other people and I feel better...

I suppose it is like an artist who sees amazing works but cannot paint to that standard, but is well beyond drawing stick figures with crayons.

Sounds like a trivial problem but it probably impedes my progress with a lot of things.

Bad code is bad code. Whitespace isn't going to help you decipher what it means.

I do not think that GoTo is bad. It can lead to hellish code but if you don't misuse it - it can be extremely useful.

me giving advice to beginners: don't feel bad about your code. as long as it gets the job done, it's good

also me: don't look at my code. it's terrible!

When the code is so bad that fixing one thing breaks 10 other things because the code was made to work with broken code.

When the WYSIWYG editor needs to go back to school for coding.

<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br></span>

How is that even useful!?

I regularly diss on PHP in office but the truth is just that the developers before me wrote bad code. It was bad code in PHP alright but they had a whole framework to use and at least organize their code better but they didn't use it.

I have seen their JavaScript code too and it was all in one file.

P.S. I have no idea under which condition they had to write the code. The app was initially outsourced.

When your app is full of bad code

Life's too short to write bad code... but then what puts the food on the table?

How do you call this php error, data not assigned to variable?

Agile coach Agiling: We shouldn't need code reviews as long as there is pair programming.

Me Internally: bad code + bad code doesn't make good code :(

Bad dev habit: code first, ask questions later.

Other than that I'm pretty much perfect <3

So, I was fixing some code today, and stumbled upon this. Is it just me, or is this really an example of bad bad practice...? And, no, there was nothing to be executed after this function was called.

When you want to use Visual Studio Code so bad, but you're waiting for them adding minimap feature.

* Cries
* Cries a lot

Started a new job this week, picking up the front end development of a property management system, since they're old developer just left.

Oh my god was his code bad, inconsistent use of js versions e.g only sometimes using lambda for anonymous functions, variable names that were a single letter, no comments, no documentation, and over 30000 lines split into almost 30 js files, following the logic of it is as fun as a hedge maze with no exit.

The person who writes bad code is called noobgrammer

That feeling when you think your workflow is bad and happens to see"Professional" Degree level team of coders writing crap code with even crappier workflow

Dev Confession:
I wrote a bunch of code today that created more problems than it solved. I did not commit it. I used git stash to hide it. It took me hours to write. I didn't do a test on a small section of code beforehand. Literally hours of wasted man hours.

At least I didn't commit this garbage into the repo. The approach was fine, but the architecture made it a non-solution. Now I need to redesign this code or leave as is. It is production code I cannot just "change" on a whim.

I have officially dubbed this week as confession week. This should be a world wide thing. People should fess up to their terrible deeds. Lets start a trend and confess to our misdeeds in code and life. Make the world a better place!

What do you say?

Is it bad habit to code on bed?

I need guidance about my current situation.
I am perfectionist believing in OOP, preventing memory leak in advance, following clean code, best practices, constantly learning about new libraries to reduce custom implementation & improve efficiency.
So even a single bad variable name can trigger my nerves.

I am currently working in a half billion $ IT service company on a maintenance project of 8 year old Android app of security domain product of 1 of the top enterprise company of the world, which sold it to the many leading companies in the world in Govt service, banking, insurance sectors.

It's code quality is such a bad that I get panic attacks & nightmares daily.

Issues are like
- No apk obfuscation, source's everything is openbook, anybody can just unzip apk & open it in Android Studio to see the source.
- logs everywhere about method name invoked,
- static IV & salt for encryption.
- thousands of line code in God classes.
- Irrelevant method names compared to it's functionality.
- Even single item having list takes 2-3 seconds to load
- Lag in navigation between different features' screens.
- For even single thing like different dimension values for different density whole 100+ lines separate layout files for 6 types of densities are written.
- No modularized packages, every class is in single package & there are around 100+ classes.

Owner of the code, my team lead, is too terrified to change even single thing as he don't have coding maturity & no understanding of memory leak, clean code, OOP, in short typical IT 'service' company mentality.

Client is ill-informed or cost-cutting centric so no code review done by them in 8 years.

Feeling much frustrated as I can see it's like a bomb is waiting to blast anytime when some blackhat cracker will take advantage of this.

Need suggestions about this to tackle the situation.

"All code and no rant make all of us a bad DEV"

Automatically clean up code, removing redundant and duplicate bits, splitting large functions, and formatting it nicely. Especially useful when trying to understand some garbage code someone else wrote which you need to rewrite.

I have this constant fear of showing my code to the world, but I’m confident to show my work to the world... How do I overcome this?

Stop commenting out code blocks!

Either fix your shit or delete it.

I am open to argue what fixing may mean, as it is perfectly fine to make your broken code not reachable, e.g. via feature flags or skipping certain tests. Yet never ever should you comment those blocks!

So you say you want to keep it for historic reasons? You know, that is why we use version control! If you ever need certain functionality back, you can restore that state.

Each decent IDE also offers a local history where you can even restore code blocks that weren't even pushed or committed. So use that!

Commenting out test cases is a really bad habit, as you have no reminder that you shall restore it.

And no, a TODO and a FIXME won't count as a reminder as you have to actively look for them. And we all know how well that goes, don't we? (One time, I found a typo of a `TDO`. So even with a regular lookup for TODO, stuff will slip.)

Each test suite offers you ways to skip tests if there are valid reasons why they should not fail the build temporary and they offer colorful feedback. Yes, that means that your tests won't be green, but guess what: That's a feature! They shouldn't be.

That yellow is a fine reminder, aka warning!, that you should really fix your shit.

Commented code screams: "I DON'T KNOW WHAT I WAS DOING!" and it confuses the hell out of other developers ("Was this commented because of debugging purposes and should be active again or can I safely delete this!?") and adds verbose crap to the code base.

If you find yourself to be in a place that you comment code a lot, I also argue that your workflow is broken.

When you are using a decent debugger, there shouldn't that much of a need to comment in and out a lot of code in order to reason about your code-base.

Is it wrong that I feel a genuine sense of accomplishment for having once written code so bad it caused an access violation in the compiler?

Code review moment that I hate

Me: This is a bad practice. You shouldn't do this
Developer: But it works

*Showed articles and examples why it's bad*

Developer: I see. But it works. Why should I change it?

Do you ever look at old code from years ago a think “god that was bad”? I’m so embarrassed by something I wrote on 2010, it’s shockingly bad!

I actually feel a little low and think maybe I’m not very good! Of course now my code is so much better but think to myself, is what I’m writing now gonna be the same down the line?

I don't think there is anything more painful than seeing some programmers writing badly formatted code.
I mean how can anyone use a single space or completely inconsistent spaces and tabs.
What is more painful is that you cannot scream at them because you don't wanna be an A-Hole trying to force your methods to others.

Two things actually bad I do :
* Put some printing lines everywhere to debug, and then, debug.

* A syntax than can be pretty bad if not handled properly :

if (your test)
do_something();

I actually always put a tabulation to see the hierarchy and break lines, which is not optimized AT ALL but help me to read, and I hope helps other to read too.
But that's a bad habit tho if you have bad presentation of your code (which I don't have, given how people compliments my code presentation)

The code in that last PR was so bad it crashed my browser...

Haha, just found some code I wrote a year ago. Really bad...

"I don't write code to feel bad, I write bad code but I feel good!"