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by comprev 1213 days ago
Fun fact:

Over 50,000 procedural PHP5 files under zero revision control, without a non-production environment to test on, power one of the largest "grey area" e-commerce platforms currently online. The type of place where you can resell medical pills which claim to cure every illness under the sun.

"index_old_test1.php" etc. was normal and the codebase went back to 2005.

It runs (unless things have changed... which is unlikely) on 3 physical servers - HAProxy, Apache2 and MySQL5.

No backup or failover/redundancy.

Oh, and more PII / GDPR data than you can shake a stick at - unencrypted at rest and in transit between app & database servers.

Everyone shared the same root password (no SSH keys!) with boxes listening on 22 via public IPs.

Thankfully the contract was a short albeit terrifying experience.

Never seen anything so bad in nearly 20yrs of tech.

2 comments

Lmao, this sounds like every 2005 PHP project.

I think part of me would actually kinda enjoy this experience just for the nostalgia factor. I got surprisingly good at making changes in prod without causing downtime...

That sounds aweful. I didn't think there were still shops that don't even have source control and just edit code in prod.