| Here's a story I haven't shared in awhile. One of my first gigs actually getting paid to code was getting hired on as a last ditch effort to save what was (unknown to me at the time) a failing business. It was a company that basically relisted real-estate auctions on their own site, coded entirely in PHP, by a single developer who had read "How to Code PHP in 24 Hours". They had one client that was basically keeping them afloat. It was so disorganized that at one point I was tasked with making a quick YouTube commercial in Adobe Premier for a client, showing off the features of our whitelabel product with their logos, edited from a stock template. I do not know Adobe Premier. I digress. The main PHP file (yes) was 20,000 lines of code. Want to add a new feature? Copy that file into a new file and save it as newfeature.php. Database operations weren't transactional, there was no change management, and for about a week we were using production systems to code until development environments were made for us. There was other shady stuff going on too, like using over a hundred proxy accounts to scrape content from other listing sites. I refused to touch or even look at that logic in the codebase, and it was always talked about in kind of a hushed way. I was young, didn't know any better, would nope the eff out if a similar opportunity came along at this stage in my career. They folded shortly after laying off pretty much everyone but the CEO and the lone coder. Dumpsterfire would be an understatement, but my coworkers were chill and helped make the best out of a bad situation. EDIT: Oh yeah! I forgot to mention the hardcoded password the was site wide that we used as a sort of "impersonation" feature. You could type in any user account and this password, and it would log you in no problem. No, we did not have auditing controls. |