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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[–] purplemonkeymad@programming.dev 4 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

Ok so this one is someone trying to move to "the cloud."

They had a database they used. It was on a server in the office. We were tasked to clone the db server to a hosted VM. Due to order of creation this got put on a new host without anything yet on it.

They needed a site to site VPN to keep privacy, that was all fine. However after the clone and during testing, their guy there said that this one part was really slow. We take a look and everything is good with performance of the server and of the VPN. I have to pop on to take a look.

It was in an office app and written in VB. (I forgot which one.) It was indeed slower on the hosted server. So I took a look at the function (he got it up for me) and I could instantly tell the issue.

This part was a lookup page that searched for you input. The function retrieved the entire table, then filtered the results in the client. I explained that transferring the whole table over the internet would be slower than on the local lan.

This guy said he originally wrote this, but "forgot VB."

In the end they decided not to update the app or keep the server in the office, but instead they rented some VDIs in the same data centre as the db.

[–] vrek@programming.dev 1 points 11 hours ago

I saw a talk recently, I can find the video if you like but pretty sure it was the most recent ND conference, where they made the point that a lot of lack of efficiency in modern code is because of large companies. Basically in alot of cases it's more important to get a product out ASAP then to care if it was well done. Ok, a poorly written program may cost an extra $10,000 a month to run but if it earns them a million a month and saves 6 months of development time it pays for itself and they can eat the cost.

This seems like the case with renting vdis instead of fixing the program.

[–] bitjunkie@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago

Sounds like he didn't have much to forget