Worst of breed software

Just last week at my job we apparently converged on a Kubernetes deployment to host a static site, due to company security policies related to publicly exposing buckets to the internet... I died a little inside that day.

Devasta• 6 months ago

Thats honestly the reason why most stuff is a web app these days. For desktop software you need to deal with IT security losers who recoil in horror at the idea of computers running software, and god help you if you need a port opened.

Far better to shove everything through port 443 and redownload the software over and over until the end of time.

marcosdumay4• 6 months ago

For desktop software you need to deal with IT security losers who recoil in horror at the idea of computers running software

Windows will invariably tell them your software is not secure and block it.

It doesn't matter what the software does, all that matters is that only your company runs it, so there isn't a million people out there with a copy.

lifetimerubyist• 6 months ago

you need to deal with IT security losers who recoil in horror at the idea of computers running software

Oh boy I have some bad news for thise IT security losers

funnybeam• 6 months ago

As an IT security loser it’s not your software I’m worried about, it’s your OpSec. I’ve seen enough innocuous software being owned and being used to deploy malware that it takes a lot of due diligence to trust providers of random binaries

nunez4• 6 months ago

I mean it's a legit use case. Kubernetes is awesome for large scale web hosting. Much simpler than writing huge NGINX configs.

gjsman-1000• 6 months ago

I have personally seen well meaning older devs saying that building on Microsoft Access with VBA is absolutely a viable greenfield stack in 2026 for small business.

And we wonder why ageism exists in our industry. Not saying that’s fair or all of it by any stretch, but ouch. It goes to show many of these worst practices are alive, well, and employable.

esseph3• 6 months ago

If you can spin up a working prototype with Microsoft Access and VBA then you can get investors and others to help build your market release.

I'm _not staying you should_, but if it works and makes money, it may not be that dumb.

nunez4• 6 months ago

This is a reasonable idea if the users maintaining the system aren't technical AT ALL. Think small business who wants a homebrew inventory system for some reason. There is almost always a better tool, but Access is still very approachable for non technical users

anishgupta• 6 months ago

did you try making it a slop but ended up making UI good? fun website, seems we're back in the days of early 2000s when discovering new websites like this was fun

SkyeCA• 6 months ago

SAFE requires more than being burnt with fire. If SAFE were an SCP it would be apollyon class.

worik• 6 months ago

Need to save state for an HTML form?

UUencode all 354 fields (64MB string) and put it in a hidden input field!

Twice!!

tormeh• 6 months ago

Templated YAML - and all YAML eventually becomes templated - is so bad it makes me yearn for XML. We had it bad and we made it worse.

marcosdumay4• 6 months ago

I dunno why nobody used things like external includes in XML, but the worst parts of YAML were there too. (But at least, I think XML doesn't have macro expansions, so that's a win.)

mpyne• 6 months ago

I dunno why nobody used things like external includes in XML

In practice they led to fairly severe security vulnerabilities. "XXE" used to be an OWASP Web Top 10 issue, and the reason it dropped off the list was because XML mostly went away, not because it stopped being a thing.

But at least, I think XML doesn't have macro expansions, so that's a win.

XML, like HTML, has entities that can be expanded. Unlike HTML you can define them in XML and this led to the "Billion laughs attack": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_laughs_attack

actionfromafar• 6 months ago

At least in XML you could easily see where a tag ended and a single whitespace too much or too little wasn't sure to make your day worse. (Though, sometimes it did.)

Dwedit• 6 months ago

Still hard to beat Syncronys SoftRAM.

neilv2• 6 months ago

Thank you. I've been doing distributed systems for years, when and to the degree appropriate, but this Worst Of Breed career guidance resource should help me position my skills, for current hiring priorities, to maximize my impact, towards enterprise objectives, going forward.

But seriously, it's not only cynical careerists who are pumping resume keywords like it's a game everyone is playing, and everyone keeps quiet about RDD, etc., because nobody wants to spoil it for everyone. It's also people who are really into one of the keywords, and think it's the most important thing, or the only important thing.

-- Past Case Study #1 --

Context: interview with systems research PhD brand-new founders, after my cold outreach pitch as a "startup generalist" (I think I said it in the headline) who would complement the scientists.

Me: (paraphrased) You're the experts in novel distributed systems research niche X, and I can't help you with that. What I can help with is all the other early startup work you'll need done, like bespoke infrastructure that works with X, Web consoles, mobile apps, some systems programming, product definition, project management, helping academic researchers and industry engineers work together, whatever needs to be done.

PhD founder: (this might be an exact quote) We need an expert, not a generalist.

-- Past Case Study #2 --

Context: interview with a mid-stage startup's CTO, who was hired for distributed systems expertise.

Me: I suspect that a Postgres server on a modest cloud server can handle the entire planet's activity of X. And (since the company's recruiting materials emphasized bias for action, and rapid iteration) we could very quickly build and validate that empirically with simulated transaction load. Of course, in production, we'd set up Postgres with distributed failover, etc.

CTO: I going to need a severalth one-on-one interview with you, an offer is imminent, but it's unclear whether you'll ever be allowed to talk with anyone else on the team, who you pointedly have still not yet met.

sgarland2• 6 months ago

I am personally offended by [0]. Maybe you should spend some time doing proper data modeling when you design your app, and maybe adding a new column should be a painful exercise.

Haphazard schema is the quickest way to develop terrible performance, loss of referential integrity, and insane queries. Well, outside of sticking everything into a JSON column.

0: https://worstofbreed.net/patterns/schema-bureaucracy/

esseph3• 6 months ago

stands up I'll admit one of my sins

I have occasionally stuffed json into proprietary software data fields to get that data accessible/usable by another system.

(High performance not required)

neilv2• 6 months ago

That could be a virtue.

And some closed proprietary software does things like adds a few additional fields for pragmatic end user extensibility like this.

The practice predates JSON, but sometimes your bespoke string or ID or whatever in field "Custom 1" is all compromise you need to make things work well.

netbioserror• 6 months ago

I've used JSON as an additional options input to a native-compiled CLI program's various commands because 1) the schema of each option is radically different, 2) they need to be passed most of the way down the call stack easily for each stage of our calculation and report generation.

It works fantastically well, and don't let anyone tell you that you MUST bloat the CLI interface of your program with every possible dial or lever it contains. We should all be cogent of the fact that, in this very young and rapidly evolving profession, textbook and real-world best practice often do not overlap, and are converging and diverging all the time.

sgarland2• 6 months ago

OK… there are some exceptions where it makes sense. In the web dev world, though, the overwhelming majority of cases I’ve seen it used are along the lines of “we don’t know what we might need later,” AKA “either product didn’t adequately specify the requirements, or we didn’t do proper data modeling.”

arwhatever3• 6 months ago

Hoo boy some of these (anti) patterns really resonate.

I want to name names - I could cross-reference some of these with specific company names that you've heard of, but I shan't.

I'll definitely keep this website in my hip pocket to privately throw at teams going forward, as needed.

tombert7• 6 months ago

During my exit interview at a BigCo, when they asked why I was leaving I said "I just don't think it was a very good fit", which I believe is the most polite way of saying "I just didn't like the job".

The manager doing the exit interview started getting defensive and blaming my "attitude problems" [1], and eventually I started explaining that it felt like the entirety of the culture at BigCo, particularly amongst management but even with engineers, came down to "try and justify your existence in the company". Instead of doing things ways that are easy and straightforward, you instead were incentivized to make your code complicated so you can brag about how complicated it is, and then drop constant references to your management about how hard what you're doing is.

The manager didn't like this response, and got more defensive, we ended up going back and forth, and eventually the interview ended and despite taking a pretty considerable paycut I was ok with my decision.

I didn't know the term "Resume Driven Development" until after I left, but that was a pretty accurate description.

[1] Not completely wrong, but that doesn't absolve them of their sins.

arwhatever3• 6 months ago

Yeah I've worked at enough places that could generate vastly more software feature ideas than they could ever implement, to find the "justify your own existence"-type places utterly insufferable. And I absolutely refuse to suffer them and everyone else should too.

arwhatever3• 6 months ago

"How about YOU justify my existence BEFORE making the decision to hire me in the first place?" - I've never quite said but have come close.

(Sorry, you struck a nerve with your BigCo depiction. :-)

tombert7• 6 months ago

I've never really figured out a test to tell if the company is going to fall into that category without actually working at the company.

It's not as simple as "BigCo" vs startup; I've worked at startups where layoffs were frequent enough that it devolved into existence justification, and I've worked at BigCos that actually did give a fair bit of leeway in how you do things (within some degree of reason).

The closest thing to a "rule" that I've come to is if they use a less-mainstream language; if they're routinely using Haskell or something, they're probably a bit more onboard with experimentation, but that's still not a hard and fast rule.

locknitpicker2• 6 months ago

Instead of doing things ways that are easy and straightforward, you instead were incentivized to make your code complicated so you can brag about how complicated it is, (...)

I see this as a red flag, and an attitude problem typical of toxic employees. I'll explain why.

More often than not, I see this sort of complain from junior developers who either completely miss key requirements behind constraints or are completely oblivious to operational constraints. They invest little to no effort to try to understand the problem domain and what problems are fixed, and instead they redirect all their energy arguing for major rework that they claim makes things simpler albeit their analysis is superficial and simplistic as they are oblivious to the actual constraints. But that doesn't dissuade them.

This analysis failure ends up creating problems within the team because they conflate any lack of support for their half-baked ideas as an irrational opposition to their personal initiative, and thus somehow a part of the problem. Consequently, you start to see those types lashing out at team members and throwing accusations and being an all around pita. They pull these stunts at every single occurrence of any minor inconvenience, as if it automatically means anything else is always better than what they have.

The worst comes if these egregious types get their way. They roll out a change that they depict as a silver bullet for all inconveniences, except that even in ideal circumstances in the real world there are always minor inconveniences. When they surface, these egregious types get all defensive and throw tantrums to bully the team into suppressing any sort of criticism that they themselves spent their time creating for others.

There are many reasons why some companies impose and enforce principles such as "respect what came before" and "disagree and commit". No one wants to work with the assholes who don't follow these principles. Their output is always pristine and the shit shortcuts they took are always thoroughly justified, but he'll forbid if someone else's changes have anything that pricks their sense of taste.

It's a red flag. Clearly an attitude problem. Throwing a whole organization under the bus is a clear tell. If everyone around you is an asshole, the ugly truth is that you are very likely the only asshole around.

tombert7• 6 months ago

I didn’t dispute attitude problems. If you had finished reading the comment you’re responding to you would have seen that. I also stand by what I said.

I wasn’t trying to rework everything and I am not 100% sure how you reached that conclusion. There were just plenty of times that for certain things there were clear simpler ways of doing things but those weren’t sexy and you were only incentivized to constantly do things to make yourself seem important instead of actually doing work.

I’m not an idiot, I know that you cannot rewrite everything in a 20+ year old codebase, and I wasn’t suggesting as much. At BigCo, instead of actually doing work, you instead were expected to hold several meetings about every minor change you were going to make, come up with a million classes and abstractions that serve no purpose other than to increase your LOC count, and then have a bunch of things to point to at your end of year self-review.

I am pretty sure most of my teammates liked me just fine, because I was generally not critical of any individuals code, because I felt like most of these issues were top down. Management created a situation that if you wanted to get a reasonable yearly pay raise you had to be able to point to a bunch of “big successes” (their words) in your yearly “self review”. Great if you have big projects to point to, but if you’re working on a “keep the lights on” team like I was, you start running out of new proper nouns to list. Instead have to constantly rebrand any small small thing you do as an “initiative”, and you point to the dozen meetings you called for it, and maybe even literally mention the LOC written for it.

Companies that have been around for awhile will always have cruft, and I agree, a lot of seemingly “stupid” code actually has a good reason for being that way, and I knew that even at the time. The code quality itself wasn’t really what I was complaining about, it was the politics around it.

But please go on about how you think that I shouldn’t be able to express my frustration at a corporation’s idiotic policies at an exit interview.

nunez4• 6 months ago

I felt some of these personally.

"We are doing DevOps now! The developers write Dockerfiles and the Ops team operates Jenkins, which cannot build the Dockerfiles."

I have DEFINITELY seen this done in production back when containers were en vogue! This and Dockerfiles passed around by email.

ansgri• 6 months ago

Best of breed design!

doodlesdev• 6 months ago

This might now be one of my favorite websites in the internet. It won me when I saw the "Excel Backend" design pattern [0]. I wish so fucking much I had never seen this before or heard of using Excel as a database.

update: I'm feeling actual physical pain by reading this and remembering every single piece of software or website I've seen that actually applies these patterns [1].

[0] https://worstofbreed.net/patterns/excel-backend/

[1] https://worstofbreed.net/patterns/js-bundle-bloat/

musicale• 6 months ago

I assumed it would just redirect to microsoft.com.

But instead it crystallizes the core methodologies of the entire industry.

This should probably be some sort of industry certification or ISO standard.

Worst of breed software

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