I’ll give an example. At my previous company there was a program where you basically select a start date, select an end date, select the system and press a button and it reaches out to a database and pulls all the data following that matches those parameters. The horrors of this were 1. The queries were hard coded.

  1. They were stored in a configuration file, in xml format.

  2. The queries were not 1 entry. It was 4, a start, the part between start date and end date, the part between end date and system and then the end part. All of these were then concatenated in the program intermixed with variables.

  3. This was then sent to the server as pure sql, no orm.

  4. Here’s my favorite part. You obviously don’t want anyone modifying the configuration file so they encrypted it. Now I know what you’re thinking at some point you probably will need to modify or add to the configuration so you store an unencrypted version in a secure location. Nope! The program had the ability to encrypt and decrypt but there were no visible buttons to access those functions. The program was written in winforms. You had to open the program in visual studio, manually expand the size of the window(locked size in regular use) and that shows the buttons. Now run the program in debug. Press the decrypt button. DO NOT EXIT THE PROGRAM! Edit the file in a text editor. Save file. Press the encrypt button. Copy the encrypted file to any other location on your computer. Close the program. Manually email the encrypted file to anybody using the file.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    6 days ago

    A program that HR had built so that all employees could they their payment receipts online

    The username was the companies’ email address, the password was a government personal id code that you can lookup online, a don’t change, and you can’t update the password to something else.

    So I told the director of HR this was a bad idea. She told me I was overreacting until I showed her her own receipt, then she finally understood that this is a really fucking bad idea.

    Okay, so now she out me in charge of debugging that program.

    So I setup a meeting with the director of the company they hired, he came by with the developer: a 21 yo girl who I think hadn’t finished college yet. Great start! Apparently it was her idea to do the authentication like that so that explains a few things.

    So we dive in to the code.

    First of all, the “passwords” were stored in blank, no hashing, no encryption, nothing. That wasn’t the worst.

    For the authentication she made a single query to check if the user email existed. Of that was true, then step two was a second query to see if the password existed. If that were true, the email had been authenticated.

    So let’s say, hypothetically, that they had actual passwords that people could change… I could still login with the email from anyone, and then use MY OWN password to authenticate.

    This just blew my mind so hard that I don’t think I ever fully recovered, I still need treatment. The stupidity hurts

    • groet@feddit.org
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      I wouldnt blame that on stupidity as much as on ignorance and naivety. Many people simply don’t think about anybody deliberately misusing their design. The idea that somebody could even want to access somebody elses receipts didn’t occur to them. And if they were still doing their studies they might not have known that you can “combine” SQL queries and ask for two things at once.

      I don’t blame the girl, but whoever chose her to design a system with sensitive information.

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        5 days ago

        I don’t blame a girl for doing a job that lands her food on the table. I blame the guy employing her because she’s the cheapest option

        Having said that, this design was so bad that she should not have been doing any of this. If you don’t know that SQL allows you to select multiple columns then by all means, do a tutorial, it’s not that hard.

        If you don’t even know what encryption is, that passwords need hashing and what not, then you should really question what you’re doing

        OPs question was about the worst code I’ve seen, that was the worst I’ve seen

        • RobertoOberto@sh.itjust.works
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          4 days ago

          If you don’t even know what encryption is, that passwords need hashing and what not, then you should really question what you’re doing

          I agree with your point, but I would phrase it more generally: when we’re assigned a task in a problem space we are unfamiliar with, we should always take some time to research that space before designing our solution.

          After all, if we don’t know what encryption or password hashing are, how could we know that we need to learn about them first? But spending just a couple hours one morning reading about password and authentication management would have given the developer a good sense of best practices.

          So she either, A) didn’t think to familiarize herself with a new topic prior to working on it, or B) did read about it and ignored general industry guidance. Both of those options are more problematic to me than simply not knowing specific things. Those are process problems that need to be addressed to build her skills as a developer.

          But ultimately, in my opinion, this is really all the fault of the cheapass director who didn’t want to pay any experienced professionals to handle the task.

          • psud@aussie.zone
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            3 days ago

            It wouldn’t take much google-fu to get a worked example of good authentication in whatever language. She can’t have tried, she must have just gone “programming 104 covered how to SQL, I can use that”

  • quinkin@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    XML-DOM page templates stored in a database, line by line.

    So rendering a page started with:

    select * from pages

    where page_id = ‘index’

    order by line_number asc;

    Each line of XML from each record was appended into a single string. This string was then XSLT transformed to HTML, for every page load.

    • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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      This has to be one of the worst ways to reinvent a filesystem that I’ve ever heard. At the very least, storing static data in an relational database at this scale should be a slappable offense.

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        6 days ago

        The session data, that would have been fantastic to have in a relational, queryable, reliable and trustable format was stored as a single giant string of PHP pickled data structure in a session file associated with the users cookie id.

  • Valmond@lemmy.world
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    The architect sending a pointer over an API, in hexadecimal string format. char *c = “71E4F33B” just cast it on the right structure bro.

    Just to add, we only did C/C++, on windows mfc, in a monolithic software.

    I spent quite some time assuring myself that I was not the insane person before bringing it up with him.

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      A memory pointer? So it must have been a program sending a pointer using an API to itself so it ends up in the same process again?

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      Mine was very much like that, but they also deleted the pointer after sending it, but before receiving it for good measure.

  • FigMcLargeHuge@sh.itjust.works
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    7 days ago

    Long time ago, but by far the worst for me was when I inherited some code that a previous programmer had done. Every variable was a breakfast item. So if biscuit>bacon then scrambledeggs=10. Shit like that. It was a nightmare and luckily I only had to deal with it infrequently.

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      Why do people do stuff like this, is the logic not difficult enough to follow on it’s own without a secondary definition table to consult!? Fucking hell.

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        Had a programmer like this when I was still an apprentice. He was so full of himself. Was originally a Java programmer but had to program in PHP because that was what ran on the server. I never found out why he couldn’t just put Java on the server. We had full control.

        All his variables were first names. Like $klaus and $grobi. Because he was afraid of clashing with reserved keywords. The thing is, in PHP all variables begin with $ exactly to prevent this issue. So he brought that habit over from Java which was far superior and not such a “Mickey Mouse language”.

        I mean, he wasn’t totally wrong, especially back then PHP was awful. But he surrounded every function with <?php and ?> (PHP was designed to be combined with HTML output outside of these tags) and had plenty of whitespace between them and couldn’t fathom why all his html files had huge swaths of whitespace at the start.

        His way of preventing SQL injection was to look for SQL keywords in user input and then throwing an error in the log files.

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      I don’t know what’s worse… That program or that you put biscuits greater than bacon…

      Actually I think the greater crime is biscuits being greater than bacon

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      I don’t know how old you are but when I was in school, this was just going out of style. They saw this as job security. If you’re the only one who can work on the code, then they won’t fire you

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      Oh god, that’s worse than I’ve seen where a SQL query joining 10 tables aliased all of the tables as a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j.

      It was a mess, and as a new dev on the project, trying to figure out which where clause was for which table and how things worked was a fucking nightmare. Trying to keep a dictionary of letters to real table names in your head as you looked at the query was very taxing. In the end, I just fixed it all to stop using aliases. Or to use short abbreviations.

      Here’s a mock example:

      SELECT
          j.delivery_eta,
          c.cat_desc,
          a.part_number,
          h.region_label,
          f.wh_loc,
          e.emp_last,
          g.state_flag,
          b.mfg_title,
          i.ship_track_code,
          d.order_sum,
          a.created_on,
          j.last_scanned_at,
          e.emp_first,
          c.cat_code,
          g.state_level
      FROM parts AS a
      INNER JOIN manufacturers AS b 
          ON a.manufacturers_id = b.id
      INNER JOIN categories AS c 
          ON a.categories_id = c.id
      INNER JOIN orders AS d 
          ON a.orders_id = d.id
      INNER JOIN employees AS e 
          ON d.employees_id = e.id
      INNER JOIN warehouses AS f 
          ON a.warehouses_id = f.id
      INNER JOIN inv_state AS g 
          ON a.inv_state_id = g.id
      INNER JOIN regions AS h 
          ON f.regions_id = h.id
      INNER JOIN shipments AS i 
          ON d.shipments_id = i.id
      INNER JOIN logistics AS j 
          ON i.logistics_id = j.id
      WHERE
          (b.mfg_title LIKE '%Corp%' OR b.mfg_title LIKE '%Global%')
          AND c.cat_desc NOT IN ('Unknown', 'None', 'Legacy')
          AND (d.order_sum > 1000 OR d.order_sum BETWEEN 250 AND 275)
          AND e.emp_last ILIKE '%berg'
          AND (f.wh_loc IN ('A1', 'Z9', 'M3') OR f.wh_loc IS NULL)
          AND g.state_flag IN ('ACT', 'PENDING')
          AND h.region_label NOT LIKE 'EXT-%'
          AND (i.ship_track_code IS NOT NULL AND i.ship_track_code <> '')
          AND (j.delivery_eta < NOW() + INTERVAL '90 days' OR j.last_scanned_at IS NULL)
          AND (a.part_number ~ '^[A-Z0-9]+$' OR a.part_number IS NULL)
          AND (
              (c.cat_code = 'X1' AND g.state_level > 2)
              OR
              (e.emp_first ILIKE 'J%' AND d.orders_id IS NOT NULL)
          );
      
      
      • psud@aussie.zone
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        That’s how mainframe programmers at my workplace do SQL. I think they do it due to long table and field names and narrow mainframe COBOL files

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    Oh boy, this one was a doozy…

    Was working at a very big company named after a rainforest on smart home products with integrations for a certain home assistant…

    New feature was being built that integrates the aforementioned home assistant with customer’s printers so they can ask the assistant to print stuff for them.

    The initial design lands from our partner team with a Java backend service fairly nicely integrated with some CUPS libraries for generating the final document to be sent to the customer’s printer. All good.

    They are about to launch when… uh oh… the legal team notices an AGPL licensed package in one of the CUPS library’s dependencies that was absolutely required for the document format needed by the project and the launch is cancelled.

    So the team goes off in a panic looking for alternatives to this library and can’t find any replacements. After a month or two they come back with their solution…

    Instead of converting the document directly in the backend service with the linked CUPS library (as AGPL is a “forbidden license” at this company) the backend uploads the initial document to an S3 bucket, then builds a CUPS document conversion bash shell script using some random Java library, the shell script is then sent (raw) to a random blank AWS host that comes prepackaged with CUPS binaries installed (these hosts were not automated with CI/CD / auto updates as was usually mandated by company practice because updating them might remove the CUPS binaries, so they required a ton of manual maintenance over the service’s lifetime…), the bash shell script is then executed on that “clean” host, downloading the document from S3, converting it via the CUPS command line binary, then reuploading it to another S3 bucket where the Java backend picks it up and continues the process of working the document through the whole backend pipeline of various services until it got to the customer’s printer.

    This seemed to satisfy the legal team at the very least, and I have no doubt is probably still in production today…

    The kicker though? After all those months of dev work from a whole team (likely all on 6 figure salaries), and all the time spent by various engineers including myself on maintenance and upkeep on that solution after it was transferred to us?

    An alternative, completely unrestricted corporate license was available for the package in question for about $100 per year so long as you negotiated it with the maintainers.

    But that was a completely unacceptable and avoidable cost according to upper management…

  • csm10495@sh.itjust.works
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    5 days ago

    There was something like

    # sleep for about a second on modern processors
    math.factorial(10000)
    

    After it was found we left it in the code but commented out along with a sleep(1) for posterity.

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      I saw one where the program ran a busy loop on startup to calculate how long it took. Then it used that as an iterations-to-seconds conversion for busy loops between scheduled actions.

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    Floats for currency in a payments platform.

    The system will happily take a transaction for $121.765, and every so often there’s a dispute because one report ran it through round() and another through floor().

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      Presumably every so often there’s a dispute because 0 + (0.3 + 0.3 + 0.3) - 0.3 - 0.3 - 0.3 is not equal to 0 (in floating point arithmetic).

    • RecallMadness@lemmy.nz
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      Lmao.

      Using floats for nearly anything in a finance platform should be grounds for immediate dismissal.

      • psud@aussie.zone
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        Round is the safest way of using decimals for money as it corrects 10.499999999 (decimal fractions can’t be stored precisely in floats as binary can’t precisely represent all 2 digit decimals) to 10.50, where floor would take it to 10.49

        It is safer to count in cents and have a policy to handle fractions of cents from divisions

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    7 days ago

    A registration form and backend that would return the error “please choose more unique password” if you choose a password that was already stored (in plain text) in the database against another username.

    I shit you not.

    • psud@aussie.zone
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      Create a moderately ok password, hash it, use the hash as your nice unique password, as a private joke for when the database leaks and yours is the only password that’s hashed and you start getting spam saying they know your password hunter2 (because they incorrectly dehashed the password) or 2ab96390c7dbe3439de74d0c9b0b1767 (md5 sum of hunter2; because they correctly read it as plain text)

  • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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    One time, I had to request firewall access for a machine we were deploying to, and they had an Excel sheet to fill in your request. Not great, I figured, but whatever.

    Then I asked who to send the Excel file to and they told me to open a pull request against a Git repo.
    And then, with full pride, the guy tells me that they have an Ansible script, which reads the Excel files during deployment and rolls out the firewall rules as specified.

    In effect, this meant:

    1. Of course, I had specified the values in the wrong format. It was just plaintext fields in that Excel, with no hint as to how to format them.
    2. We did have to go back and forth a few times, because their deployment would fail from the wrong format.
    3. Every time I changed something, they had to check that I’m not giving myself overly broad access. And because it’s an Excel, they can’t really look at the diff. Every time, they have to open it and then maybe use the Excel version history to know what changed? I have no idea how they actually made that workable.

    Yeah, the whole time I was thinking, please just let me edit an Ansible inventory file instead. I get that they have non-technical users, but believe it or not, it does not actually make it simpler, if you expose the same technical fields in a spreadsheet and then still use a pull request workflow and everything…

    • vrek@programming.devOP
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      The corporate world runs on excel, never the best option, but everyone knows it so…

        • inzen@lemmy.world
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          Try a few Gigabytes. I worked on site IT support for a year, we had to max out memory on a workstation because the company database was a, about 3GB, Excel file. It took minutes to open and barely worked, crashing frequently.

      • I_am_10_squirrels@beehaw.org
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        When I was interning in a cellular biology lab, I took their chemical inventory and converted it from excel to access. Complete with forms and reports. Spent some time training the permanent staff how to use it, explained how it was much more efficient than excel.

        I don’t think they bought into it, but I tried.

  • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
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    I don’t have any specific examples, but the standard of code is really bad in science. I don’t mean this in an overly judgemental way — I am not surprised that scientists who have minimal code specific education end up with the kind of “eh, close enough” stuff that you see in personal projects. It is unfortunate how it leads to code being even less intelligible on average, which makes collaboration harder, even if the code is released open source.

    I see a lot of teams basically reinventing the wheel. For example, 3D protein structures in the Protein Database (pdb) don’t have hydrogens on them. This is partly because that’ll depend a heckton on the pH of the environment that the protein is. Aspartic acid, for example, is an amino acid where its variable side chain (different for each amino acid) is CH2COOH in acidic conditions, but CH2COO- in basic conditions. Because it’s so relative to both the protein and the protein’s environment, you tend to get research groups just bashing together some simple code to add hydrogens back on depending on what they’re studying. This can lead to silly mistakes and shabby code in general though.

    I can’t be too mad about it though. After all, wanting to learn how to be better at this stuff and to understand what was best practice caused me to go out and learn this stuff properly (or attempt to). Amongst programmers, I’m still more biochemist than programmer, but amongst my fellow scientists, I’m more programmer than biochemist. It’s a weird, liminal existence, but I sort of dig it.

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    7 days ago

    So, this is completely off topic, but some of the comments here reminded me of it:

    An elderly family friend was spending a lot of her time using Photoshop to make whimsy collages and stuff to give as gifts to friends and family.
    I discovered that when she wanted to add text to an image, she would type it out in Microsoft Word, print it, scan the printed page, then overlay the resulting image over the background with a 50% opacity.
    I showed her the type tool in Photoshop and it blew her mind.

    • greygore@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      I am simultaneously horrified that she didn’t do any research to see if she could insert text into the image and incredibly impressed at her problem solving skills. Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I lean towards impressed; good on her!

    • bluesheep@sh.itjust.works
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      Haha that’s so dumb. She could’ve just taken a screenshot!

      I showed her the type tool in Photoshop and it blew her mind.

      Or well. That.

    • CaptDust@sh.itjust.works
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      Aw really wholesome actually. Some libraries in my area have senior friendly editing classes, I think it’s becoming more popular. Good looking out for them!

    • vrek@programming.devOP
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      Photoshop is amazing. That said you kinda need to take a course in it to use 80% of the functionality.

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    6 days ago

    There was a website where users could request something or other, like a PDF report. Users had a limited number of tokens per month.

    The client would make a call to the backend and say how many tokens it was spending. The backend would then update their total, make the PDF, and send it.

    Except this is stupid. First of all, if you told it you were spending -1 tokens, it would happily accept this and give you a free token along with your report.

    Second of all, why is the client sending that at all? The client should just ask and the backend should figure out if they have enough credit or not.

    • vrek@programming.devOP
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      I agree but I would say if there are variable token costs depending on report it would be nice if client sent request to server, server calculates x tokens to be used, sends x to client, client confirms that’s acceptable, server does work.

      Like if I expected a report to be 2 tokens but because of some quirk or a typo or something it cost 200 tokens I would like a chance to cancel it if it’s not worth it.

  • i_stole_ur_taco@lemmy.ca
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    7 days ago

    I found code that calculated a single column in an HTML table. It was “last record created on”.

    The algorithm was basically:

    foreach account group
      foreach account in each account group
        foreach record in account.records
          if record.date > maxdate
            max = maxdate
    

    It basically loaded every database record (the basic unit of record in this DATA COLLECTION SYSTEM) to find the newest one.

    Customers couldn’t understand why the page took a minute to load.

    It was easily replaced with a SQL query to get the max and it dropped down to a few ms.

    The code was so hilariously stupid I left it commented out in the code so future developers could understand who built what they are maintaining.

  • invertedspear@lemmy.zip
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    6 days ago

    First of all, lack of ORM isn’t bad. It’s not a good or bad thing to use them out not use them. What’s bad is not sanitizing your query inputs and you don’t need an ORM to do that.

    I think the worst thing I’ve seen is previous devs not realize there’s a cost to opening a DB connection. Especially back when DBs were on spinning rust. So the report page that ran one query to get the all the items to report on, then for each row ran another individual query to get that row’s details was probably one of the slowest reports I’ve ever seen. Every DB round trip was at minimum 0.1 seconds just to open the connection, run the query, send back the data, then close the connection. So 10 rows per second could be returned. Thousands of rows per page has people waiting several minutes, and tying up our app server. A quick refactor to run 2 queries instead of hundreds to thousands and I was a hero for 10 min till everyone forgot how bad it was before I fixed it.

    • BehindTheBarrier@programming.dev
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      It’s the round trips that kill you.

      Oracle drivers for .NET are fun. Have a user client application which uses quite a lot of data, but a few thousand rows are fetched some queries. It’s way too slow for any larger query, turns out for the batch query kind of work we do, the default FetchSize for Oracle is just a performance killer. Just throw it to 128 MB and it doesn’t really hurt at all.

      Worst thing i’ve seen though, apart from the 150 line long dynamic sql stored in our database, was probably a page in our program that loaded about 150 rows from the database. Normally we do create a new connection for each query, but it’s fine since Oracle has a connection pool. Whatever millisecond is trumped by the round trip. But imagine a UI so badly written, it did 4 separate database queries for EACH row it loaded into the UI list. Useless things like fetching a new ID for this row in case it is changed, reading some data for the row i think, and more. Thing took a solid minute to load. There was so many bad patterns in that page that even during the PR for improving the speed it was just dealing with a mess because you couldn’t just rewrite the entire thing, so they had to make it work within the constraints. Horrible thing to work with.

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    I’ve had legacy systems that would encrypt user passwords, but also save the password confirmation field in plain text. There was a multitenent application that would allow front end clients to query across any table for any tenant, if you knew how to change a header. Oh and an API I discovered that would validate using “contains” for a pre-shared secret key. Basically if the secret key was “azh+37ukg”, you could send any single individual character like “z” and it would accept the request.

    Shits focked out here, mate.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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      7 days ago

      Rules I’ve learned from software engineering for almost 2 decades.

      • Never roll your own ORM
      • Never roll your own Auth

      No matter what you think, someone else did it better. Trying to do either of those outside of a hobby environment is pure hubris. “But I can do it better” - no you fucking can’t. I have wasted much much more time debugging shitty “home grown” ORM solutions that clearly some dev just was bored and did than I have spent figuring out the quirks of whatever one I’m using. Same goes for auth. Just learn it.

      • TootSweet@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        Never roll your own ORM

        I’ve done this. Probably 10 years ago. Even today, I maintain the same application that has the ORM in it that I designed. If I could go back in time and do something else, I’d do the same thing again. Honest to god. For my use case, I feel it was warranted. It was risky, but it worked out surprisingly well.

        • Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          6 days ago

          If I could go back in time and do something else, I’d do the same thing again.

          So many questions here. What language? What’s the database? How many years of experience do you have in industry?

          We are the worse evaluators of our own code, some of us are down right terrible but most people regret less significant code choices in a matter of months. The fact that you still think it is good 10 years later is a massive red flag.

          • TootSweet@lemmy.world
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            6 days ago

            Java, Postgres mostly but also LDAP and random in-house-written RESTful services, almost 20 years.

            • The objects we store in the Postgres database are very “hierarchical” in nature, with one top-level object and lots of child/grandchild/great-grandchild objects. (We asked for a Mongo database but the infra team at the time said "make do with Postgres.)
            • As I mentioned, some of that hierarchy is in LDAP or RESTful services, not in Postgres, so we needed something capable of dealing with multiple storage backends that would stitch the objects together as necessary. So the “ORM” needed to have backends for multiple backend systems.
            • We knew clients would need a vast number of different queries. So we made a RESTful endpoint that gave the full power of the ORM to (authorized) clients. If they needed different data, we’d be like “change your query like this” and they didn’t have to wait on us.
            • Early in the project, we consciously designed an extensible JSON representation of our hierarchical objects. That is what’s returned from the aforementioned RESTful endpoint.
            • However, we also created a “shortcuts” system to allow us to “balance” how much of the logic lived on the server vs in the client. (It can mix and match. Like “apply this shortcut, but also filter this way and paginate” or whatever.)
            • We made the API of the ORM such that it could both be used to query from the database/LDAP/RESTful systems, or be used as a client SDK for the aforementioned RESTful query endpoint that the application exposed.
            • It’s both “more than an ORM” (querying from non-database sort of backends) and not fully an ORM (read only, doesn’t handle schema evolution.) But it’s fair to say it’s more “an ORM” than “not an ORM”.
            • The implementation of the Postgres backend part of it is heavily inspired by Django’s ORM.

            We couldn’t have pressed Hibernate into this use case. It doesn’t really deal with hierarchical data and sure as hell doesn’t know how to query from LDAP. I don’t know that anything existed at the time (nor am I sure anything exists now) that would fulfill our use case.

            And the alternative to what we built was a massive, unmaintainable DAO with ridiculous numbers of individual queries in it that would have to be modified or added to endlessly every time someone needed to filter a bit differently or whatever.

      • Pieisawesome@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        7 days ago

        The SVP over my org keeps wanting to design his own RBAC/Auth/IAM system.

        We have entra, auth0, and keycloak.

        The reason he wants it is he doesn’t want secrets to setup auth. Like that’s how it (mostly) works, sunshine.

      • chocrates@piefed.world
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        7 days ago

        I never fuck with auth. If I can throw it up the stack I’ll do it as much as I can. When I can’t I find an open source solution and Im sure I still misconfigure it

      • Caveman@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        I kinda rolled my own ORM, it was just a glorified class to SQL parameter converter that is then passed onto some SQL code. Then there was a thingy that marshals the result. Using table value functions in SQL standardises the result so any select * just works. It was around 50-100 lines total.

    • vrek@programming.devOP
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      7 days ago

      I have to ask, if it’s only contains wouldn’t you get a ton of collisions?

      Expecting an apartment manager to know what a api header was nevermind how to change it is probably not likely. Security hole to be sure though.

      • CaptDust@sh.itjust.works
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        7 days ago

        The secrets themselves were basically guids, they had quite a lot of characters. If sent MORE than 1 character, pretty low chance they would clash. But those long guids also covered a lot of letters and number - it wasn’t terribly difficult to find one single character that cleared authorization reliably.

        And maybe you’re joking lol, but multitenant meaning multiple businesses/customers using the same application stored in the same database. If Bob’s construction wanted to spy on Jim’s contracting, they’d just need to know the right header to send and could get whatever they wanted from the other customer partitions. User access should of course be limited to their own assigned partitions.

        • vrek@programming.devOP
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          7 days ago

          Oh, ok I interpreted multitenant wrong. I was thinking it was like a apartment complex so you have like a manager and a sales person with access and that’s it. Still a valid security risk but not as severe as what you are saying now.

          Sorry for confusion

    • Hasherm0n@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      I once saw an application that would encrypt (not hash, encrypt) passwords but then when a user was logging in, they’d encrypt the password candidate and then compare the cipher texts to see if they were the same. This was using 3des, so no IV.