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Share the most embarrassing code you've ever written

Peter Kim Frank on May 25, 2023

I saw this post today and it took me back to my only CS class which was taught using Java. I'll post my embarrassing final project below 🙈 ...
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Ben Halpern •

I write open source code, so all my shame is public

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Rense Bakker •

Its not so much a piece of code itself, but my most embarrassing moment was when I got called behind the pc of a team mate and he showed me that his password was visible in localstorage, because the login I implemented put it there... I put the credentials instead of the token in localstorage and then I messed up further, by adding the password to the token which isn't private either, just slightly harder to decode 🤦 in the end I did it right, but that was a painful way to learn 😅

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Sendil Kumar •

@peter Are you implying that post had some embarrassing code? ;)

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Matt Eland •

I don't have it because I don't own that code (a former employer does), but I had a commit that I later had to fix in production with the comment "The only explanation I have for this past code is that I was coding on painkillers at the time". I can't recall the specifics of what the code was, but I still remember the message of the fix commit.

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cloutierjo • • Edited

Can't reproduce exactly but goes like this (pseudo code):

Enum step: a; b; c;

For value in step{
    Switch (value){
        Case a:
             // Do something
             Break;
        Case b:
             // Do something
             Break;
        Case c:
             // Do something
             Break;
        Default:
             // Do something that won't ever happen
    }
}
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Took me a while to understand that in the end it was just procedural code and no enum, switch or for loop were required. (Ps it was probably a 200 lines function! Which in itself is embarrassing)

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Randall •

Most of my most embarrassing code is lost to the sands of time.

But when I was a huge n00b at frontend stuff, one of my first projects was a web game for practicing Japanese kanji readings, and it was disgusting. Not only did I suck at CSS, I sucked really bad even just at coordinating colors too.

It got reviewed here and you can see some screenshots. Just hideous, I cringe to see it now.

I am still bad at frontend, but not as bad. I have polished this project up a bit since and it's far from amazing but I'm no longer ashamed of it :)

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Thomas Rigby •

tbh I've seen worse design from "professional web designers" 🤷‍♀️

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Stuart •

Cursing Css for an hour before I turned my monitor brightness up...