by Most of us can remember building our first website or application and the excitement that came with learning new techniques and languages. However, years (or even months) later when we look back at our first tentative steps in web development, we realize just how horrible those first lines of code where.
Sites such as The Daily WTF are even dedicated to user-submitted examples of bad code and software design.
Inspired by this I’d like to ask the readers here at Woorkup to share your own personal coding horror stories and examples of of the worst, invalid and downright ugly code you’ve written or seen?
Don’t be afraid to share because as Jeff Atwood perfectly summarizes: “every developer in the real world has had bad days, brain faults, or bad interpretations of new languages, environments or libraries. It’s simply a given of the profession.”
November 3, 2009 at 9:55 am
One of my very first sites was built entirely in Flash. Being completely unaware of ‘load times’, I used all the crazy effects/animations I could find and didn’t compress anything. Lol, it was a mess. Took about 1½ mins to load on broadband.
November 3, 2009 at 10:13 am
Fantastic! :)
November 3, 2009 at 10:17 am
In my spare time I like to do a little webdesign. In light of that you might have guessed what my personal ‘Coding Horror’ is.
Internet Explorer (either 6, 7 or 8) is my ‘Coding Horror’. In order to make it work in that browser I have to double my initial development time.
November 3, 2009 at 10:20 am
I think there is something worse than Internet Explorer 6… Do you remember IE5 and the implementation of the CSS box model? :))
November 3, 2009 at 10:24 am
definitely Internet Explorer, coding is wonderful, Microsoft makes it a “Horror Trip” i just looked at a site i currently work on with IE6…. what a mess! i’m so desperated No, nothing is right and divs are somewhere else than they should be, fucked up all my grid… really there’s nothing badder than internet explorer, i mean nothing, not even outside of webdevelopement.
November 3, 2009 at 10:24 am
Even the mention of IE5 makes me shudder!
November 3, 2009 at 10:52 am
IE5 is even worse…. does anybody still use that?
November 4, 2009 at 6:34 am
About half a percent of our +54M annual visitors still use a version of IE older than 6. None of our vendor’s products support those browsers anymore so we don’t expend the effort to accommodate them. To be fair, some of these might be bots, crawlers and spiders using the IE5 signature.
November 5, 2009 at 12:54 pm
Look here: http://blog.iampaddy.com/2009/09/01/venn-diagram-of-ie6/
It’s a funny pic about IE6 :D
November 3, 2009 at 10:22 am
I’m currently working on some amazingly effed up php scripts built on some god forgotten cms with a plugin like design first built by some amateurs that actually work at an advertising company.. nothing is where you think it should be and nothing makes any sense what so ever… Great success!
November 3, 2009 at 10:25 am
my first website was in tables made in fireworks. I was learning that time how to build the websites. I always used design view in dreamweaver for finalizing html but .. i remember when I edited one of its page in notepad .. It was horrible experience .. i used lots of tables of tables .. n in note pad i was just like a child lost in code … oh ..
n other nightmare was IE 6 n netscape navigator … wooohh ..
recently i redesigned that same website .. but in code view n of course in table less format. thanks to xhtml n css tech.
November 3, 2009 at 10:30 am
The first PHP code i wrote was profile page… And i did not knew what is the POST and the GET global variables… So i kept trying the POST and the GET until i can fetch any result… and everytime i remember this i say ‘ Damn i was really sucks… ‘ :P .. But now i can talk PHP :P
November 3, 2009 at 11:04 am
Well i started to program very early with BASIC on an ATARI XL800, i did an astrology program calculating planet positions and even a small database with birthday information (at least 5 years before i heard for the first time the term database ;)…
well the funny thing were the calculations, i had only an array of numbers called ‘a’, so most of the code looked like:
a[35]=7*a[14]+74*a[56]/a[3]-6*a[8];
pages long… really great stuff!
November 3, 2009 at 11:11 am
Interesting idea. For myself I haven’t really had any coding horrors of my own, besides working with a few select people’s code as well as the osCommerce system – both have made me question human’s ability to process correct logic. However, my coding horror would more relate to my business’s image. I started freelancing when I was 16, so at that age I really didn’t understand how businesses and all that marketing side of things truly work. However I only managed to burst out all those essential realisations on how to run a proper business and market yourself at the age of 20. So pretty much every time I look at my own website (last updated when I was 18) I cringe going oh why oh why did I do it like that… it is so arghhhh. Luckily now with my extra professional suave I have a new design coming that I truly adore, can’t wait til it launches :-)
November 3, 2009 at 11:13 am
See even things like that gravatar for my personal email account makes me cringe ahahha. Will have to make sure I watch which email I use now when posting comments (dammm gravatars haha) ;-).
November 3, 2009 at 11:22 am
Building iframes on geocities. I still have nightmares about that horrible looking code (not to mention the design as well).
I’ve currently thrown myself into learning some advances javascript and I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep for weeks. o.0
November 3, 2009 at 11:29 am
Ah Geocities, that brings back memories! I built my first ‘website’ using it many years ago ;-)
November 12, 2009 at 2:29 pm
iframes!!!! Oh my god!!!!
November 3, 2009 at 11:27 am
Does this count? I was in a web design class where the teacher didn’t think JavaScript was useful or important to teach us! Later, I saw a local web design company where the senior web coder was still using tables for layout was and making very code-bloated sites with blotchy CSS…
And lets not talk about how I coded 5 years ago x.x (psst: I loved frames and IE.)
November 3, 2009 at 11:35 am
My personal horror stories come in one of two forms:
Leaving a “;” off of the end of a line of PHP coding or anything involving plain javascript and forms. For some reason I always break things when I attempt it…
November 3, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Any story that was a result of using google’d information to build an application. :)
November 3, 2009 at 2:20 pm
I need to design a site, but I’m not allowed to alter the HTML only the CSS. The HTML contains 26 errors and it’s overly complicated. This is terrible!
November 3, 2009 at 4:20 pm
While building a simple CMS from scratch using PHP (Joomla was still in its infancy back then), I was racking my brains over this perfectly okay query that wasn’t getting processed.
After almost two weeks of sleeplessness, I found out that it was all due to a version mismatch – some time back I had updated my version of PHP. Although everything else was working fine, there was a minor bug in the new version that was causing the trouble. I had to rollback the whole thing.
Lessons learned: 1. Always read the documentation, carefully. Not everything is on Google, or even on the forums. 2. Backup more often.
November 3, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Absolutely…. IE’s Browser !! >_<
November 3, 2009 at 5:41 pm
how many of you had fun with soap service clients in php.. upon asp or java? ( and btw, as long as it goes for joomla, drupal, wordpress etc… I’ve come to the conclusion, if you want something done right and exactly for what your goal is, Do It Yourself! )
November 4, 2009 at 2:00 am
Coding horror at my internship. Working on an eCommerce system called RightClick on an internship, the webapplication produced horrible html code, including tables and about 1000 errors when validating. Me, as a lover of clean coding and CSS had the worst months of my webdesign life.
November 4, 2009 at 6:48 am
In my early days of coding, i didnt have any idea about pluging websites to databases…so I attempted building a directory Website and maually designing a differnt page for te different companies on the directory.
I gave up after building abour 150 different pages.
I guess I know better these days and Thank God for database driven sites…lol!
November 4, 2009 at 7:29 am
My coding horror was trying to figure out how to send html e-mails that actually showed up right in hotmail, yahoo, outlook and all those. I can’t believe none of these support absolute position and stuff like that -.-
Urgh, it took me days figuring out another way to place a text right over an image, without having to cut the image up into a million pieces. Sounds stupid, i know, but it was a pain in the ass.
November 5, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Mine, i still laugh when i remember, it was in 1996 i used paint to work on graphics, anyway i got paid $600 for the website, but looking back at it, i think the owner felt sorry for me but he paid me anyway, thats how bad when i remember that website
November 7, 2009 at 7:21 am
My first Dynamic web used .txt file to store data, and I used for data separator ‘|’ , think about when I accidentally used this separator within data cell, the mess it did was unbelievable :)
Thinking again for this makes me laugh :-D
November 28, 2009 at 5:55 am
I remember my early days of coding, I got hold of Dreamweaver and I obviously started using it. I heard great things about it and I trusted it blindly. However, this was back in ‘02 or ‘03, so dreamweaver wasn’t really as smart as I thought it was. It created tables like mad, and at one point I had over 16 tables nested within eachother and a .html file at over 200kb, and at this time nobody hardly had broadband atleast within my area (Southern Sweden) and the website didn’t became the hit I hoped it’d be due to that. Looking back at it, and yes I have the source somewhere, it’s quite funny though
January 17, 2010 at 6:30 am
The first shoutbox I made had no user input validation what so ever. Just a day after the thing was online someone took avantage. 150 javascript alert’s… and another 100 iframes to a porn site… Strange enough though, that was when I realy got my intrest in programming!
February 4, 2010 at 6:54 am
The very first website i designed was in plain html, it was a mix of xhtml and html lol. And i didnt use php at all. It had 15 pages with the same layout and the way i designed the template was to copy paste the code from one to another. That meant even a slight change in the temple meant copy pasting it in all 15 pages lol..