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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Back when I was in college I took a computer engineering class around 2010 I think with a professor who had done CPU design at one of the big chip manufacturers. He had a story about how no human knows how they work anymore because they’ll do the designs, then feed them through some optimization algorithm thing before the fabrication. Then when they would evaluate the chip they’d find that it was behaving in completely unexpected ways due to the optimization finding crazy efficient but unintuitive (to a human) ways of performing different operations.

    I wish I could remember the details of what he talked about better, but that was a long time ago.












  • There are a couple that come to mind.

    Definitely the worst, a C# .net mvc application with multiple controllers that were 10s of thousands of lines long. I ran sonarqube on this at one point and it reported over 70% code duplication.

    This code base actively ignored features in the framework that would have made things easier and instead opted to do things in ways that were both worse, and harder to do. For example, all SQL queries were done using antiquated methods that, as an added benefit, also made them all injectable.

    Reading the code itself was like looking at old school PHP, but c#. I know that statement probably doesn’t make sense, but neither did the code.

    Lastly, there was no auth on any of the endpoints. None. There was a login, but you could supply whatever data you wanted on any call and the system would just accept it.

    At the time I was running an internal penetration test team and this app was from a recent acquisition. After two weeks I had to tell my team to stop testing so we could just write up what we had already and schedule another test a couple months down the line.