Code smell Memes

Posts tagged with Code smell

Party Hard

Party Hard
When someone asks what you're doing on a Saturday night and you're literally hardcoding a massive array of random numbers like some kind of digital masochist. Nothing screams "living your best life" quite like manually typing out 7,62,2,46,79,83,26,82 and continuing for what looks like an eternity. The timestamp showing 17:54 is just *chef's kiss* – because who needs happy hour when you can have array initialization hour? This is the programming equivalent of counting grains of sand on a beach, except somehow less fun and more carpal tunnel inducing. 241K views because apparently we all love watching someone's descent into madness in real-time.

Iterator, Jterator, Kterator...

Iterator, Jterator, Kterator...
You know you've hit peak laziness when you're nesting loops and your variable names become a countdown to despair: i , j , k ... and then suddenly you're reaching for l and questioning every life choice that brought you to this moment. But here's the real kicker—instead of just using those single letters like a normal person, someone decided to get fancy and call them "jterator" and "kterator" because apparently j wasn't descriptive enough. It's like putting a bow tie on a dumpster fire. If you're three loops deep, you're either working with matrices, doing some cursed algorithm nobody should touch, or you've architectured yourself into a corner. Either way, that code review is gonna be spicy.

Year

Year
So everyone's screaming about JavaScript being terrible, but then you look at how developers actually get the current year in production code. Instead of just using new Date().getFullYear() , some genius decided to hardcode "2025" wrapped in a beautiful mess of <footer><small> tags that don't even close properly. The closing </small> is chilling AFTER the text instead of wrapping it correctly. Maybe JavaScript isn't the problem. Maybe it's the developers who refuse to use it correctly. This footer will be hilariously outdated in about 365 days, and some poor soul will have to manually update it while the rest of the internet just... uses a date function like normal people. The real kicker? They're complaining about hardcoded YEARS while literally hardcoding a year. Chef's kiss. 💋👌

When She Asks How Long Is It

When She Asks How Long Is It
Someone's codebase just jumped from line 6061 to line 19515. That's not a typo, that's a 13,454-line function sitting there like an architectural war crime. When your coworker asks "how long is that function?" and you have to scroll for the next 20 minutes to find the closing bracket, you know someone's been writing code like they're paid by the line. Pretty sure there's a Geneva Convention against functions this long. The debugger autocomplete showing line numbers in the five-digit range is basically a cry for help.

The Best Way To Make An Infinite Loop

The Best Way To Make An Infinite Loop
Someone discovered that C#'s ConcurrentDictionary.AddOrUpdate() method is basically a cheat code for infinite loops. Instead of the boring while(true) , they're using a lambda that ignores the key, ignores the current value, and just... keeps updating the same dictionary entry forever. The lambda returns value , which triggers another update, which calls the lambda again, which returns value , which... you get it. The genius part? The IDE shows "No issues found" because technically this is perfectly valid code. It's like telling your compiler "I'm not stuck in an infinite loop, I'm just very enthusiastic about updating this dictionary!" The output window spamming "Hello, World!" is chef's kiss—proof that sometimes the most cursed solutions are also the most creative. Pro tip: Don't actually do this unless you want your code reviewer to question your life choices and your CPU to file a restraining order.

Client Side Validation

Client Side Validation
So you're checking if an email is already taken by sending it to the server, getting back a list of all registered emails , and then doing a client-side .includes() check? That's like asking the bank to give you everyone's account numbers just to verify yours doesn't exist yet. Not only is this a massive security vulnerability (congrats, you just leaked your entire user database to anyone with DevTools open), but it's also hilariously inefficient. Why return an array of potentially millions of emails when the server could just return a boolean? The backend dev is probably crying somewhere. The cherry on top? After doing all this client-side "validation," you're still showing success messages without any actual server confirmation. Chef's kiss of terrible architecture. 🤌

Just Reuse The Class Bro

Just Reuse The Class Bro
Someone really looked at their codebase and said "let's make one class do literally everything." Entity, DTO, Domain Model, API Contract, AND Kafka Message? That's not code reuse, that's architectural Stockholm syndrome. Sure, you saved yourself from writing a few mappers, but now your database entity knows about your message broker, your API exposes internal IDs, and your domain logic is coupled to JSON serialization annotations. Good luck explaining to the new junior why changing a Kafka field breaks the database migration. The tears in that meme? Those are from the poor soul who has to refactor this nightmare six months later when requirements change. Separation of concerns died so you could avoid writing three extra classes.

The Truth Is Watching Me

The Truth Is Watching Me
You know that feeling when you're in the standup meeting confidently calling it a "microservice" while internally screaming because it's basically a distributed monolith wearing a fancy hat? That nervous side-eye says it all. Your so-called microservice has more endpoints than a porcupine has quills, shares a database schema with everything else (violating every principle of service independence), and has "modules" that are just glorified folders pretending to be separate concerns. It's like calling a studio apartment a "luxury multi-zone living space." The worst part? Everyone on the team knows, but nobody wants to be the one to say "hey, maybe we should refactor this before it becomes sentient and enslaves us all." Instead, you just keep adding more endpoints and praying the database doesn't become the single point of failure it was always destined to be.

Peak Code Reuse

Peak Code Reuse
Ah, the infinite loop of laziness masquerading as efficiency. Two functions locked in an eternal codependency, each refusing to do its own work. isEven() just passes the buck to isOdd() with a +1 twist, while isOdd() returns the favor by calling isEven() with the same trick. Neither function actually checks anything – they just play hot potato until the stack overflows and the whole program collapses like my will to review pull requests on Friday afternoons.

Query Inception: When Your Query Is So Query It Queries Itself

Query Inception: When Your Query Is So Query It Queries Itself
Ah, the classic SQL query written by someone who clearly learned database access from a fortune cookie. The SQL is backwards—it should be "SELECT * FROM Customers" but they've written "FROM Customers SELECT *". The real chef's kiss is that this is wrapped in a method called "GetCustomersQuery" inside a class called "Query" which is also creating an object called "query" of type "Query.Query". It's like naming your dog "Dog" and then calling your dog's puppy "Dog.Dog" and then teaching it a trick called "GetDogTrick()". Four years of computer science for this masterpiece. 💀

It Scares The Hell Out Of Me

It Scares The Hell Out Of Me
The toughest developers who fearlessly debug production issues at 3 AM suddenly turn into trembling wrecks when faced with a global array full of zeros. Nothing strikes terror into a programmer's heart quite like stumbling upon someone else's undocumented global variables. Those zeros aren't just empty values—they're empty promises . Whatever story that code was supposed to tell has been wiped clean, leaving only the haunting structure behind. It's like finding a murder scene where the killer meticulously cleaned up all the evidence except for the chalk outline.

Pirate Software Shows Off His Security Code

Pirate Software Shows Off His Security Code
OH. MY. GOD. Behold the PINNACLE of cybersecurity! 🏴‍☠️ This absolute GENIUS is manually checking EVERY SINGLE IP ADDRESS in the 1.1.1.x range because apparently, writing a regex or using a wildcard would be TOO MAINSTREAM. 💅 It's like watching someone bail out the Titanic with a teaspoon! What happens when hackers discover the revolutionary concept of 1.1.2.1? Will our pirate hero write another 256 if-statements? THE DRAMA! THE SUSPENSE! I can't even with this "security" code! 😭