Can’t catch a break

  • 0 Posts
  • 295 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: October 12th, 2023
  • i_dont_want_to@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoProgrammer Humor@programming.dev•What are some of the worst code you have seen in a production environment?
    32·
    3 months ago

    I was told about a bug in a specific tool. It was being used in production. Apparently we’ve gotten a lot of complaints about it over the years, and they would complain if the site was actively used it always failed.

    I couldn’t find it in the development branch in source control.

    I asked if this tool was purchased from a third party. My boss, who was not a developer, said no. And he was very sure of that. But he didn’t know where the code was.

    I was the developer with the most seniority, and I was there for less than a year at this point.

    I looked again. I finally found it… In an unapproved pull request from a few years prior.

    The meat of this tool basically took information to make an order and create an order in the system.

    Any time we needed to insert a record, it would find the highest Id in the table, increment 1, and insert the new record, id and all. It did this for every entity that needed to be inserted. Address, customer… Everything.

    Worse, very little validation was done. Want to order something but it’s out of stock? No problem, this tool just pushed it right through.

    Want to ship something using a shipping method that doesn’t exist? You got it.

    Want to ship something to an address that doesn’t exist? Sounds like the warehouse’s problem.

    Knowing about the level of knowledge here, you know that there were no transactions. All sorts of unused records were left in the database when there was an error. The users would get a generic error and try again several times, too.

    The worst part was, we have an already existing function that would take order information and try to make an order. And it would give you actionable errors!

  • i_dont_want_to@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•SipsTea
    2·
    3 months ago

    I had mine in my early 20s. Sucked. Laying the groundwork for my own stability was a lot harder than it should have been, but I got it done anyway with a combination of a mountain of determination, an incredible amount of work, natural talent and smarts, and so much luck.

    But the child will be an adult by the time I am 40, so I got that going for me.