Ben Halpern

Posted on Jun 14, 2019

What's your worst nightmare as a coder?

#discuss

Top comments (118)

David Daly • Jun 14 '19

Production releases on a Friday evening 😐

Alejandro López • Jun 14 '19

Doing this today. Yeah...

David Daly • Jun 14 '19

Good luck 👍

Alejandro López • Jun 14 '19

Thanks! We just happened to find a somewhat-critical error on Google Analytics and decided to pull the trigger ASAP to get it fixed. Shouldn't be too traumatic of a deploy :)

Hoovinator • Jun 15 '19

Hope you have some good CI/CD for that :-)

Alejandro López • Jun 15 '19

Yup! Jenkins rules :)

It didn't go as well as it could (some repo drama), but we managed to get stuff done. Yay!

Hoovinator • Jun 15 '19

Awesome! Late night deploys suck, we have to in some cases to reduce user downtime. We had to recently migrate an entire AWS VPN - business team was "shipping their pants". It went fine with minimal downtime. Which leads to a question, when should Developers NOT tell business about some changes? I have found that sometimes they make things worse off than they should be.

David J Eddy • Jun 14 '19

Been there, done that. Leave before they ask you to work weekends.

Kyle Griffin • Jun 14 '19

If they are asking, you don't need to say yes. If you need to get out the building before this, then they are not asking you, in which case you need to LEAVE THAT JOB!

Aaron Kulbe • Jun 14 '19

I think the goal should be to get to the place where this isn't a big deal. Testing in production should be a thing. That's not a trolling comment, and I'm dead serious.

Get to where you can deploy multiple times a day, every day, all day.

For reference, read stuff by Charity Majors about observability.

Thomas H Jones II • Jun 14 '19

Don't forget, "when a critical resource is starting two weeks' PTO the next day".

David Daly • Jun 14 '19

That's bringing it to a whole other level 😂

Zia • Jun 18 '19

exactly :)

Valerio • Jun 14 '19

😆😆😆😆😆 great

Ben Greenberg • Jun 14 '19

A toxic unsupportive work environment.

Timkor • Jun 14 '19 • Edited

Internet Explorer

Brian Hanna • Jun 14 '19

I hate it so much.

Nate Shoemaker • Jun 14 '19

Hopping into an already existing project that has no tests.

rhymes • Jun 15 '19

I understand the dread and I've felt it. I know I'm weird but writing tests or reverse engineering something is a great way to learn how something works :D

You shouldn't have to but still...

See it as an exploration adventure :D

David J Eddy • Jun 14 '19

110% this.

Bryan Robinson • Jun 14 '19

One Word: Databases :D

So important, yet so dangerous if you're not good at them.

rhymes • Jun 15 '19 • Edited

You're the second person to mention this in a few days. We (as in devs who don't share this dread) need to be better at communicating how to use these DBs because they are so important as you said 😭

Bryan Robinson • Jun 15 '19

I’m ok at them after a couple years having to manage some, but with legacy DBs with bad tooling I get very nervous ;)

Andy Zhao (he/him) • Jun 14 '19

Pushing/releasing sensitive information/data 😰

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 • Jun 14 '19

I'm not sure if a CodeClimate plugin could check for this.
I do know that all Lambda Security products will scan for sensitive information but then you have to go serverless and pay for said service.

I like how Amazon Macie can detect (Personally identifiable information) PII and api credentials.
I guess if you're CI/CD is CodePipeline and CodeBuild which places artifacts (zip folders) of your codebase in S3 that maybe Macie could detect these issues. Uncertain if it can peak into zips.

Les Carbonaro • Jun 14 '19

Maintaining legacy code that someone else wrote years ago.

Brian Hanna • Jun 14 '19

Especially if "someone" is a younger, less experienced version of yourself

Gaurav Pandit • Oct 6 '19

I can relate to that, on my first "actual" full-time job, I had to work on code that was more than a decade old, written by someone who didn't believe in commenting code.

Luke Garrigan • Jun 14 '19

Comments that add no value.
Comments that could easily be expressed with meaningful variable/function names
Comments that are out of date and are misleading
Comments...

Casey Brooks • Jun 14 '19 • Edited

fun someUngodlyMess() {
    // DO NOT REFACTOR
}

Dustin King • Jun 14 '19

First refactoring would be to remove this comment.

Brian Hanna • Jun 14 '19

Same. You can't put that there and expect me not to touch it. I can't ignore a challenge like that.

Jake Casto • Jun 16 '19

The comment is a warning from someone who tried to refactor.

Kirill Shestakov • Jun 17 '19

I saw different variants of this, usually:

somethingNobodyCanUnderstand(); // DO NOT CHANGE THIS

I die a little inside when I see this shit

Shi Ling • Jun 14 '19

Inheriting a frontend that was a spaghetti of jQuery, Angular, jQuery UI, Bootstrap 2 and Bootstrap 3. It was a some pages SPA and some pages not, and globals everywhere. CSS was a hot mess.

My biggest accomplishments in that project were refactoring out Bootstrap 2, and making the JavaScript code modular the old-school way (this was before ES6) using Addy Osmani's JavaScript Design Patterns.