How to write unmantainable code (2015) (opens in new tab)

I did something like step #2 in C# some years ago. Pulled data from the database based on the calling function’s name.

Clean Code was mental poison for me and certainly led to a bunch of overly abstracted or overly-DRY code.

Ah yes. Just like Ruby and meta-programming games with send, define_method, and method_missing.

Oh, you mean like the oh-so-great Laravel framework, which is structured like this exclusively?

#2 Sounds like your typical Angular 1.x app.

For some reason everyone tried to be clever with code reuse in them which almost always resulted in an unsearchable mess.

> Be even more DRY by having the function guess a little if the match isn’t exact

At that point you'll be singing How DRY I Am!

https://temperanceblues.web.illinois.edu/how-dry-i-am/

Be even more DRY by having function that does quite a bit of everything, accepts different arguments, and returns different type. You only need to supply different strings to the first parameter

so, a normal ruby codebase?

Feels like a dad joke!

Similar story: a few years out of college I too inherited a codebase written in the 1990s by some genius phd, also in the finance field. Someone else clearly tried to clean it up before me. The word “WTF” was in comments throughout the codebase.

The word with Z may be related to “zahlen” which is where Z as the letter commonly used to represent the integers comes from. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer#History

Could be worse - my first was a program where someone had written the source in Delphi and run it through a Delphi -> C converter and then they threw away the original Delphi code. The resulting spaghetti was the only production code available.

Gulp. I’ve left a comment like that or two. Probably isn’t helping the cause, but it’s waving a flag for the next person who’s got budget to clean it up.

T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM

Maybe this would be a good use for AI code generation. Reversable non-obfuscated obfuscated code. If you just obfuscate it it's pretty obvious what you're doing but if an AI can obfuscate it in a what that looks like something that is plausible that you could have written it you'd get away with it. Reversable so that you could undo it make updates and then reobfuscale.

Ten levels of C++ templates and typedefs are a pretty good way of proving how smart you are and making the code completely opaque.

That last anecdote is too relatable.

I've done big government contracts for many years as a consultant in Norway, and haven't really seen this. Guess it's because Java is so much better than those .NET monoliths ;)

But seriously, I guess it depends on the maturity of those writing the tender / anbud. Too often they get bamboozled by big4 like consultancies (Accenture, Sopra Steria etc..) that act more like project managers and sales people than developers.

The company I used to work for actually stopped giving offers on lots of these kind of projects. None of us wanted to work on these kind of bureaucratic nightmares where one is set up to fail. It's much more fun to deliver something of value, even if one doing something else could've squeezed out some more money. We "fired" clients that didn't give us opportunity to actually do good or have an impact.

I think more of these public sector tenders should stop focusing on "projects", and instead focusing on just getting the correct people that can help them iteratively move in the correct direction.

Unfortunately it's often hard to get money for this. Easier to say "we need X millions for this huge project".

The worst part is that the people who work for these companies who work for the government think that they're efficient. In reality, there are often startups out there which could build the same system better in 1/10th of the time.

The bigger an organization is, the more easy money they have, the worst their expectations are when it comes to software development. I once worked for such a company as a software developer and I was shocked that I kept getting positive reviews in spite of being the laziest I had ever been. I was spending most of my time watching videos on YouTube; but the little work I did between YouTube videos was somehow better than that of their average employee...

I've been involved in some big public sector projects and it indeed went like this, but I'd say most of the blame was on the government.

The tender requirements were written by a general tender-writing team of the government.

We only got to meet the actual users of the software-to-build after we'd won the tender. Apparently what was in the tender was a complete mismatch with what the actual users wanted (as far as they actually knew what they wanted).

What the users wanted didn't matter, because payment was based on checking off all tender requirements. Oh, one of the tender requirements was "all business logic needs to be configurable by the users" and more gems like that.

Definitely true in Denmark too, their back in 2010s new tax IT system (skat-something) made a friend of mine who was sub-subcontracted from his 1-man company a wealthy man (wealthy as fully pay for small flat in central Prague, then for big flat a bit more off and then land & building a house a bit further away, only from income from this within few years, with 2 kids and wife not working).

When you get most of daily contractor fees directly, you easily end up with 15,000k$ net monthly income, working mostly remotely, in a country that had median monthly income below 1,000$.

Not that he worked hard or anything, frequently fridays looked like 'ok I am free give me some work' which almost never came. It was done on some ancient long dead weblogic/wslt things, stuff I can hack together in ie apache camel or similar in few afternoons (not 100% of it but core definitely yes).

Definitely a fault of government, no private company will come and say 'hey we can do it in 10% of the time / costs but we wont be using these big brand technologies (TM)'. Can't imagine there wasnt some big corruption too. IIRC prod launch was some major clusterfuck which filled newspapers for some time.

Sounds like my experience with software procurement in state government in the USA. The basic problem as I see it is that the companies that get contracts aren't especially good at writing software, where they really shine is in understanding the intricacies of the procurement process.

Bad software is universal. It’s purpose is to milk the public tit. Not to deliver actual value. The value is in the money being paid.

Sounds like defense industry software. You have super geniuses laying down the actual design and hardware in a few years and troglodytes writing the code for 20 years.

My favourite python function, get_data. Takes a dictionary called 'config'. Mutates it, sends it to another function called load_data. No docstrings anywhere.

Pfft. You haven’t lived until you have introduced a circular dependency between two or three modules.

I did this at my last job. It's truly astonishing how much can run inside the database. Your whole application and business logic if desired. I wrote a lot of PL/SQL which actually was not that unpleasant although god knows who can maintain that after I'm gone.

What I saw there in particular was that any given team will try to solve their problems in their domain. For example, I was in the database administrator team, and they tried to do everything in the database and use database features for everything. Then you have the DevOps/Middleware team who try to do everything in pipelines and with ansible scripts etc.

The best thing you could invest in imo. to be a good allrounder is really good knowledge of unix(like) systems and a shell which is available everywhere.

Write your cicd pipeline logic as shell scripts instead of e.g. the dsl of gitlab/github. That'll be usable in every domain!

  m_bIsLaughing

There should be more tips, like use "l" as a prefix to any number, like shorts. Also, make sure to sometimes distinguish shorts, ints and sometimes not!

Also, when you've accumulated about ten years of this, start using a different making scheme and make sure there are preferably random bits of Hungarian notation around. Make sure there's no record of why and no explanation of what Hungarian notation is and how to use it.

That feeling when you finally, finally find the bit of code you’ve been looking for… and you can no longer remember why you were looking for it, because you’ve completely purged your short term memory.

Having to track down macros across several files really annoys me as well. When I write macros in C, I place them just above the code where they are used and undefine them immediately after.

Hey we work together I see

If this comment ever becomes a reference for anyone at all, I’d be remiss if I don’t add that “alphanumeric” for some odd reason includes underscores.

I did unspeakable multiplication with regex this weekend to help a friend fix an ebook. Feel free to ask me how

I'm that one man show, within a very dysfunctional org. I write a lot of internal tools, unprompted, just to save time for me or colleagues I like. I get bored sometimes, so deep inside some of them there's a naive Forth interpreter, and I then write some non performance critical logic in Forth. It's just a silly personal joke, at least until the proverbial bus hits me.

That is why you make sure your team mates are either in on it or too weak to protest.