

Show HN your embarrassing (old) code - samlev

First I'll start off:<p>http://pastebin.com/ATdDUStd<p>That was from January 2008. I was young and stupid. I'm probably just as stupid now, but at least I can see now how stupid that was.<p>So let's open up the shame files, and show how far we've come by recognising how bad we used to be.
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thejteam
Can't post it because I don't have it but at my first job I was working
late(2am) to get something ready for an 8am demo that absolutely HAD to
happen(people flying in from across the country, stuff like that). I found a
solution that would give me the right answer. It consisted of a switch
statement. In each case of the switch statement was another switch statement.
In about 2/3 of the cases in these switches was a GOTO to the top of the
function to repeat the process. What can I say, it worked and was pretty good
for 2am work(I am not a night person.) But even my year out of college self
knew the code was bad and that I would have to re-write it. Except for the
fact that the demo went great. Our processes would only let me change code if
there was a bug. Try as I might, I could never find one. That code is probably
still in use 9 years later.

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damoncali
This post prompted me to open up the first web app I ever wrote - a Rails
1.something app that was eventually upgraded to 2.something. It was pretty
awful.

But as I went back to look at it, I found it wasn't unintelligible. It was
just noobish. Lots of silly working around things that do not need to be
worked around - that sort of thing. My models are mostly _empty_ , if that
tells you anything.

It's a testament to the Rails structure and convention that someone with no
experience and a book can write something that not only works, but is
reasonably readable despite being _totally wrong_.

As a side note, I made several thousand dollars off that app before shuttering
it. Had it worked (the idea), I no doubt would have done some major rewriting.
But it didn't so now I sit here looking at the fattest controllers known to
man.

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polyfractal
The code has long been lost to the great pastebin in the sky, but my first
serious PHP project was an absolute nightmare. I built a disbursement tracking
system for a local food bank/church while I was in high-school (~6 years ago).

The system was your basic CRUD application that tracked who the food bank gave
money/stamps/assistance too. It also allowed them to generate some fancy
reporting.

The code was so. damn. bad. This was before I even knew what an MVC framework
was. The "main" control panel page was a single, enormous PHP script that was
switch-cased. There was zero data validation, zero security, zero
maintainability. It was a nightmare in retrospect.

To be fair, I did it for free and the church loved it, so oh well :)

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mintycuts
Well, I don't know how embarrassing that is, and that's pretty embarrassing
already. I can say that everything I've done for school is probably a good
candidate, and 1 out of 3 practices using CodingBat is as well.

I love learning!

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samlev
Clickable: <http://pastebin.com/ATdDUStd>

