Rome isn’t built in a day and we all started from somewhere… Over the years growing as a developer, what is the most stupid thing you’ve done and/or seen someone else do???
Mine is: I was to create a voting site with about 82 categories and i somehow sat down and created 82 tables… one for each category Lol
A friend: He wanted to create a site that required users to have usernames and decided to use code to automatically create a new folder for each person as they sign up so that they can access the site as www.example.com/username…
Back at uni., I wrote this visual basic chat app to talk between computers in the school’s IT center/cafe. Now, you’d think my app would be listening at a particular port? Na, this was the win 2k/xp era and bright me thought using a shared folder and dropping the chat messages as txt files was a good idea. Looking back, it was more clunky than stupid.
A few years ago I created a feature for a client’s WordPress installation.
It was a directory of staff members. You enter their name, role, department and contact details.
In other sections of the site, you can assign a staff member as the point of contact for a specific product, support or general inquiry.
Assigning a contact stored a copy of the contact details instead of a reference to the source.
This was extremely foolish because if the directory was updated, the contact details wouldn’t automatically update with it. You’d need to go in and choose the same contact for the details to update.
When i first started working with Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud, i would zip a project folder and transfer to a virtual server on AWS. Go to the location where the project folder is and send to where it is supposed to be (treading with caution). Finally, unzip and replace the earlier version.
I felt very stupid when i realised there was a less cumbersome way of doing it: pushing with git right from local workspace!
However, “this stupid” thing enabled me to learn quite a few number of tricks with virutal servers.
I once believe that there is no need for a phone, all i need to do is to put the sim in my laptop and i can make calls from the laptop, my friends still remind of that time till now.
The first Bulk SMS site I built, I needed to add an address book system, so I wrote a script to automatically create an addressbook_username table for all users as they signed up. It looked quite smart then.
This one is not mine, but saw it in a code I inherited. Developer needed to count number of rows in a DB. So he did a “SELECT * FROM x” and wrote a while loop to count the number of rows returned.
Accidentally uploaded AWS dev environment credentials to a public source code repository and within 5 hours, had people, who scan these repos on a minute by minute basis, spin up large numbers of EC2 instances in different regions around the world using those credentials.
My company was forgiving but learnt an extremely valuable lesson - do not include security credentials in your code!
When I was a kid, an Aunt always tried to make me to stop eating when using my computer because she was told computers could get viruses by doing that… lmao
Lol
