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.

They were stored in a configuration file, in xml format.
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.
This was then sent to the server as pure sql, no orm.
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.

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[–] CetaceanNeeded@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

At a small company I used to work for we agreed to take over the management system for someone trading physical resources. The guy that originally wrote it was self taught. We did a hand over with him where he took us through the code base. It was written in dotnet but it was a huge mess, he had blended multiple different dotnet paradigms, there was mixed business and UI code all over the place, large chunks of html were stored in the db, db code was just scattered through the application. We took it over briefly but it was a nightmare to work on and we found a SQL injection vulnerability. So as kindly as possible we told the client that his software was a piece of shit and the dev he hired had no idea what he was doing.

[–] vrek@programming.dev 5 points 1 day ago

What was the final result? Did you cancel the contract or re-write the whole thing?