"We're replacing an old PHP website," writes Roggo, "to examine the existing functionality and test the install, we were given access to the live site. Out of curiosity, I had a look at the code that we are soon to replace. The first file I opened was called mug_password_forgotten.php; I was greeted by line 8:"
$sql = "select muguser_id, muguser_directory " .
"from mugusers " .
"where muguser_active = 1 " .
" and muguser_email = '" . $_POST["email"] . "' ";
Mr. Kashmere (from John A)
Mr. Kashmere is one of our middle school teachers. There had been a merger of two schools, and everything had changed: administration, policies, procedures... and technology. One of the new technologies they had picked up as a small school was Google Apps, including Gmail.
When I heard that Mr. Kashmere was having trouble getting new e-mail, I was curious, and figured I should go have a look at what the problem was.
Ever since being hired, Adam had spent most of his time working on new projects.
He was aware that there was an "old system" running out there and would someday be shut down and his efforts were to help this come about, but he never had the opportunity to cross paths with it. Based on what he had heard though, this was a very, very good thing.
"Lucky me," writes Joe from the Submit-To-WTF Visual Studio Add-In, "I just inherited a home-grown system information application."
"Judging from the code the previous programmer wrote, this is sadly one of the better pieces."
Last year's Code PaLOUsa (held in downtown Louisville) was a blast, and it was great to meet up with some of you guys who were able make it out. I'm definitely excited about Code PaLOUsa 2012; there's a lot of great speakers, and it's right in the heart of bourbon country.
It's said that without evil there can be no good and that without darkness, there can be no light. Is the same true of ugly and beautiful code? Maybe... but that's certainly not a question I'll be answering in this talk. Instead, we'll talk about ugly code, where it comes from, how to avoid it, and how to rid your codebase of it. And of course, I'll share some of my favorite anti-examples from The Daily WTF.
If it takes two contract developers six months to drive a project to failure, then four developers should be able to fail in half the time! Josh assumed that was why he and Sam were carted out to the client site and tossed into the oubliette of the PowerPac project. They were armed with nothing but a rusty spoon and a requirements document so old it needed to be stored in an oxygen-free environment.
The original development pair was Sally "I can code but I'm more of a designer" Jorgensen (the CEO's daughter) and Billy "I taught myself HTML in a week and am now a programmer" Jorgensen (the CEO's brother). They ran the project exactly like you'd expect such a dynamic duo to run it- directly into the ground. By the time Josh and Sam joined, it was already well past deadline and over budget.
Terry had spent the better part of the past decade digging through the trenches of QuidCorp's flagship application QuidFlow -- a program used to flowchart business processes. Though QuidFlow performed well and, overall, customers were happy with the product, whenever it came time to address a bug or investigate just how the filename validation worked; the source code was beginning to show its age.
Terry raised his concerns to management. Much to his surprise, management approved a plan to transition their C++ developers into the world of .NET through a little on-the-job experience.
