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What's your worst nightmare as a coder?

Ben Halpern on June 14, 2019

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.

KristijanFištrek • Jun 14 '19

Omg. This sounds like something FBI should use as a torturing interrogation tactics...😱

Brad • Jun 14 '19

walking into a code base with:

no test
no documentation
no types
no comments
no code quality
no automation
high complexity
high risk
no dev/test/stage environment

I hope no poor soul ever gets the check to all those boxes, but I'm sure there are people who have!

Brian Hanna • Jun 15 '19

I have a project that checks all but two of those boxes. Thankfully I have multiple environments and some build automation

Antonio Radovcic • Jun 14 '19

My own code from 24 months ago 😱

Athanasios • Jun 15 '19

That one gets me every time too! 😂

Antonin J. (they/them) • Jun 14 '19 • Edited

publishing secrets to the internet (which I did a few days ago...luckily NPM flagged it and disabled it)
losing production data 😱😱😱😱
shitty co-workers/work environment (I'm lucky to have worked at an awesome place for years!)

Casey Brooks • Jun 14 '19

Event-driven architectures.

It's basically no different from a goto statement, and we've known for a long time that gotos are considered harmful. Applications which use events to drive data flow and logic become impossible to navigate, which makes them impossible to maintain.

Kirill Shestakov • Jun 17 '19

I have a feeling there is a lot more to be said about this, and I think you maybe right and those architectures should be considered as anti-patterns. The biggest problem I find with event-driven stuff is how easy it is to lose track of what is happening, and how easy it is to introduce circular event triggering. I think the cleaner architecture would mean that it would be actually impossible to introduce a circular dependency. For example, it could be done similarly to the creation of objects. If you have classes:

class A {
    b: B;
    constructor(b: B) {
        this.b = b;
    }
}

class B {
    a: A;
    constructor(a: A) {
        this.a = a;
    }
}

It would be impossible to have a circular dependency such as above, because the creation of A's instance requires a B's instance, while the creation of B's instance requires an A's instance. So, you'll not be able to successfully run

let a = new A(); // Error - need an instance of B as the 1st argument
let b = new B(a);

I think a similar way of thinking should be applied to events.

Paramanantham Harrison • Jun 15 '19

Wow. Want to hear more on this. I believe, not the architecture but the worst implementation which is harmful.
Event driven architecture works for many use cases.

Casey Brooks • Jun 15 '19 • Edited

You're exactly right, events by themselves are not bad, and can be very useful in large, modular codebases. But a bad implementation will only get worse over time, and the nature of it makes it nearly impossible to recover from beyond a certain point.

The problem is when the app is driven by events. When one event triggers another event, which triggers another, etc. One of the most extreme examples of this is WordPress, where in it's internals methods are rarely called on their own. They mostly call each other through events, which, while they can be augmented and overridden, means tools like static analyzers can't help, you don't have good stack traces, exception handling gets confusing. As a result, you really can't refactor that code anymore, since you can't really figure out who's all listening for the event anymore. But I've personally worked with many other examples in Android, JS, and PHP.

The alternative is to only use events as a reaction. Keep the logical path in normal function calls, send events as "notifications" instead, to broadcast what you just did or what you're about to do, without altering the execution flow.

Paramanantham Harrison • Jun 15 '19

Awesome point. Totally agree

Daragh Byrne • Jun 14 '19

Making a mistake that costs a whole heap of money. I've done it twice in my career - it's never entirely my fault but I've played a part. I'd really prefer not to do it again!

Michiel Hendriks • Jun 14 '19

Management that thinks developing software is not a difficult task.

Florian Rand • Jun 14 '19

I feel you, but if you think that's bad, work as a designer, where everyone thinks design is about moving pixels around the screen 😄. Or everybody thinks that "I don't like it or I like that more" is good design feedback. I could continue, but not today 😆

Michiel Hendriks • Jun 15 '19

Florian Rand • Jun 15 '19

Hahaha that!

Gilad Ri • Jun 14 '19 • Edited

Integration and its best friend: "It works on my computer!"

Erika Heidi • Jun 14 '19

Its used to be merge conflicts, but nowadays I'd say it's when I can't find the freaking logs. I get real mad. haha

Blaine Osepchuk • Jun 14 '19

Unrecoverable database corruption including all the backups. Bye-bye business.

Alex Fallenstedt • Jun 14 '19

Taking a risk to improve some piece of code that has immense business value, and the thought of failing.

We have an Angular app that has been around for a long time. We are making plans to introduce ngrx to some of our core services so they cache data and improve our developer experience.

I'm the one person on our team with the most knowledge of ngrx, and its daunting.

Ben Halpern • Jun 14 '19

I know the feeling

Bassem • Jun 14 '19

CONFLICTS, I just hate them. Especially if I can't reach the developer I am conflicting with.

Stephen Chiang • Jun 14 '19

Upgrading framework versions...

Dian Fay • Jun 14 '19

The possibility of a bug I don't know about silently altering or losing data across weeks to months to years without obvious failures or corruption.

Sarah Katz • Jun 14 '19

My imposter syndrome stopping me from trying new things

Nicola Apicella • Jun 15 '19

With the obvious proportion of the case, one of thing that makes me lose sleep is writing/reading code that does not express the intent, I call this: code which talks about code VS code which talks about business

Quentin Sonrel • Jun 28 '19

Loosing my passion for coding (and computing in general).

Coding is really a passion to me but since I started working as professional dev I almost never code at home and I don't enjoy my professional projects as much as I used to enjoy the personal ones.

I sometimes feel like I'm wasting away my passion by having turned it into a job.

Samitha Fernando • Jun 15 '19

When your engineering team doing such an amazing work and a non technical person calling out your team velocity isn't consistent!

Szikszai Gusztáv • Jun 14 '19

Clients.

Karl N. Redman • Jun 22 '19

I hate the following scenario (which I've been part of many times in the past):

them: Here's a new urgent project. How long will it take to build it?

me: 2 weeks for a hack, 3 weeks to get it right. When is it needed?

them: We've already sold it, billing has gone out and we promised to deliver it last Thursday.

me: So, what is my drop-dead delivery date?

them: Last Thursday.

David Daly • Jun 14 '19 • Edited

I definitely agree with you here, but on Friday evenings people can often get distracted with weekend plans. Then if something goes wrong with a deployment, asking people to stay late and resolve the issues can be hard (for everyone involved).

This can be challenging, and its why our team generally tries to avoid this (but it does happen sometimes).

KristijanFištrek • Jun 14 '19

Testing...

Jake Wesorick • Jun 14 '19

Unrealistic time expectations for work being done. Turns something I love into something I hate.

Bartholomew Allen • Jun 14 '19 • Edited

It happened to me not to long ago but using a Mongo function to clean a database and then wiping out all of the data luckily Mongo has an import function and we had a backup!

Chad Kunde • Jun 16 '19

Hardware flaws that present as intermittent, inexplicable errors.

Basically, errors coming from below the lowest level I can inspect.

Carmen H. Andoh • Jun 15 '19

Upstream breakage {yells at cloud}

Tom VanAntwerp • Jun 14 '19

Screwing up authentication and leaking data.

Djordje Bajic • Jun 14 '19

Deadlines and bad project spec.

JavaScript Joel • Jun 14 '19

Hmm. That's a tough one. How do I choose? Well, if I had to pick just one it would have to be bees. As a coder, bees are my worst nightmare. Bees. 🐝🐝🐝

Adam Crockett 🌀 • Jun 14 '19

That tomorrow I won't remember anything about code.

Shannon Crabill • Jun 15 '19

That I'm not as good of a coder as I think I am, but no one will tell me or point me in the right direction.

Cory Kelly • Jun 14 '19

Scope Creep 💀

Hoovinator • Jun 15 '19

The SQL query to update user preferences for over 20,000 users in a production environment because you found a security flaw with something being saved in the database

rhymes • Jun 15 '19

...bad managment that decides to shift focus 10 times per day.

That's so exhausting :(

restroika • Jun 15 '19

changes of business processes on last minute.

Full Stack Geek • Jun 15 '19

Intermittent Bug, that's creepy shit

Heather Shockney • Jun 14 '19

The interview process

Anwar • Jun 14 '19

Critical, process-blocking bug that I cannot reproduce in local...

Fulton Browne • Jun 14 '19

Spending 3 hours trying to find a bug only to find out (after checking stack overflow) that its like one line of code and super easy fix.

K • Jun 15 '19 • Edited

When I was an employee my biggest nightmares were technology choices made by other people which I had to live with.

Benjamin Trent • Jun 14 '19 • Edited

Failing my customers. One of the worst feeling in the world is making a breaking change that hurts my customers' usability and their bottom-line.

Devin • Jun 15 '19

Any day I wake up, I could wind up down a rabbit hole which could ruin the day.

Ross • Jun 15 '19 • Edited

Code written for concision rather than readability/Coders writing "clever" code.

It is far more valuable to have readable code than concise code.

Peter Harrison • Jun 15 '19

"Don't worry about the backup, it's only a minor release".

Wachira • Jun 15 '19

Trying to raise your test coverage by 0.6% so that your PR is merged

Wachira • Jun 15 '19

Also being a blocker to someone's task.

Rahul Chowdhury 🕶 • Jun 15 '19

Having to work on a framework/language that I strictly dislike.

Ry • Jun 15 '19

This might show my age a bit, but the requirement:
“Application must support Firefox And IE6. “

Srikanth Anantharam • Jun 17 '19

Not being allowed to code.

Miloslav 🏳️‍🌈 🦋 Voloskov • Jun 17 '19

Typescript.

Rob Kendal {{☕}} • Jun 16 '19

Clients...

Hoovinator • Jun 15 '19 • Edited

Even better, a memory leak in your code you deployed in AWS causes misconfigured auto-scaling to run up a bill of $10,000 in one day

Thomas Rigby • Jun 14 '19

Currently doing onsite tech support at an event on an app I didn't build in a language I'm not familiar with 😂

Mohammad Amin Khakzadan • Jun 14 '19

writing codes.
doing worthless, time-consuming computer programming.

Vuild • Jun 14 '19

This.

youtube.com/watch?v=eUHBPuHS-7s

George • Jun 14 '19

Change.

Maxime Lafarie • Jun 14 '19 • Edited

Deploy in production the Friday at 4PM for 5PM.

Lautaro Lobo • Jun 14 '19

Working with spaghetti legacy code, and with customers that don't know what they want, or how to express it, so you have to help them to build their business, not only their website :/