Thread

Agnishom Chattopadhyay

Functional Programming Enthusiast

Apr 11, 2018

What was your most annoying experience with refactoring old code?

#programming

Responses(3)

Syed Fazle Rahman

Building Bug0, an AI-native E2E testing platform for modern apps - co-founder & ceo @ Hashnode

Apr 12, 2018

One of my old projects had jQuery, and we were using React as well. Basic DOM operations, animations, etc. was done using jQuery. As the codebase grew, we started using React Refs for DOM operations. It was a complete mess!

I would say refactoring this codebase and removing jQuery was an annoying experience for me. 😀

I have worked with many projects, but this one is the most complex and the project which really needed some serious security, The day i joined the project to revamp ... it was a serious , really serious mess , this project / web app / webservices is an project for online doctor appointment booking , patient's lifetime records, patient's medical reports , everything related to an patient , then doctor's part where doctor and it's staff is having whole part of managing their incomes , invoices, appointments and many other stuff (confidential things) , now when i open the main system core files what i see is list below :

Mysql used all over the project
Mysql used but not based on just single class from where it manages the connection for database , but individual mysql_query calls nearly in many files (1000+)
Insert + update , any user data being submitted get's never validated and checked through to be sure if it's not something malicious
File uploads , size not reduced , file type not checked , upload folder open to anyone to see all list of files in there, and execute any php file you want and delete the whole system ..
meta tags , stylesheet links , everything mixed up inside <body></body> and not in head
Multiple duplicate files of shared file which could have been just single file shared with others (just for sake of 1 line code )
Queries not optimised at all , (10s+ when clicked to book appointment)
Subscription system based on open url where you just put an package id and thats it , you are subscribed for free without paying
Full system based on spaghetti code
Endless list of issues + security issues + open to any hacker attack ...

it was not less them a nightmare to take all of this, and fix it's issues , remove non secure part of codes , applying validations to user's input ... Work still going on , many more issues to solve yet....

Mark

Apr 13, 2018

The most annoying specific one was a fairly large Fortran77 codebase. It was for quantum mechanical computations that were a bit over my head in the beginning.

In general

No static typing (makes automatic refactoring much less precise).
Relying on semi-global mutable states (that is, having a long lived mutable object structure that is too large to understand).
Too little, inaccurate or too many comments.
No tests (preferably automated, preferably unit, but anything fast and reproducible is very helpful).
Basically everything from preventing bugs: hashnode.com/post/what-are-some-programming-habit…

Search Hashnode

What was your most annoying experience with refactoring old code?

Responses(3)

Recent threads