Confessions Friday II

Discussion

1. David Walsh

   I’ll go first: I cursed Dojo around a team of Dojo developers and wished MooTools was our framework of choice. You next!
• David Walsh

  Of course, that was because I was being a Dojo n00b..
2. Terry

   I made a lot of mistakes when I started off doing web design in my secondary school years. My first website, a roller coaster fan page, was almost a complete rip off of another roller coaster fan site on the Internet. I even recycled the colour scheme (I can still remember #c8d9ff was anointed as my favourite shade of blue) for my second and third personal sites.

   Back to my first webpage – it has tables nested around 5 – 7 levels deep, I can’t remember the exact degree of nesting but it was a classical example of tablitis. My obsession with unnecessary nesting even continued into the ages when I’m more familiar with HTML – I was diagnosed with divitis.

   Oh and of course, I used <b>, <center>, and even the horrible <marquee>. Go figure how messed up my first site was *laughs*
3. Nicole Foster

   Dear father Walsh, I have committed a horrible web development sin: I have coded for IE6 though it troubled me along the way. Please forgive me for my sins.
4. Greg

   I used jQuery instead of Mootools and then commented on David Walsh’s blog. ;-)

   The real confession, though: tonight I kept getting an ‘undefined’ error and was trouble-shooting code instead of first confirming that the input data was formatted correctly. Which it was not. An hour of running in circles thinking, “I don’t get it… the code SEEMS fine!” could have been saved by checking the source data first.
5. Lolki

   I am so ashamed, because I have left some CSS attributes in my html ! :(
   Bhooooo ! I know ! So baaaaaaaaad !
6. Jesse Donat

   Once in a while I’ll get frustrated and just throw a center tag on a page.
7. David Weinraub

   I deserve what will almost be an eternity in Web-Dev Hell because I have committed nearly every sin imaginable. And I did it with full knowledge of the evil I was perpetrating. Worse, I continue to do so, though, in my defense, less and less with every passing month.

   Ongoing evils are primarily not enough unit-testing and using too many clearing divs rather than really committing to a clearfix class. [Guess it’s a fear of commitment]

   Have mercy on me!
8. David Weinraub

   I deserve what will almost certainly be an eternity in Web-Dev Hell because I have committed nearly every sin imaginable. And I did it with full knowledge of the evil I was perpetrating. Worse, I continue to do so, though, in my defense, less and less with every passing month.

   Ongoing evils are primarily not enough unit-testing and using too many clearing divs rather than really committing to a clearfix class. [Guess it’s a fear of commitment]

   Have mercy on me!
9. nagbaba

   First I wrote raw javascript code while using JQuery already in the application.

   Then I have committed some of my files to SVN without removing “echo $var; exit;” which I’ve used for test purpose.

   At the end of the week. I bypassed an Ajax request with a text file and then committed it just to check if it runs on server or not!

   Forgiveness!!!!!!
10. Michael Warkentin

    I seem to randomly switch between camelCase, hyphenated, and underscored naming conventions.
• Greg

  +1 Within the same script no less.
11. Dan

    Most of the above…. *hangs head in shame* The new site I’m building has some sweet code… and then some inline style *booo*, <b> tags (I’m ok with this as its just for presentation not emphasis), a mix of camelCase and hyphenated PHP variables and file names *booo*, I have also used CSS3 without any consideration for browser support *fail* I have every intention of going back and fixing these… if (Dan != "lazy") { $fix(); } else { $failAs-usual; }
12. Jason Long

    I’m ~80% done with my portfolio redesign and still haven’t checked in any flavor of IE. I’m hoping for the best, but fearing the worst of course.

    I reduced by guilt-debt this morning by contributing to an open source project though.
13. Mike Henderson

    I go between using tabs, 2 spaces and 4 spaces when indenting my code.
14. Tony David

    I just spend an hour fixing an IE6 issue (bullets from an unordered list didn’t display). I feel dirty
15. Jason

    In my developer life I have made 2 epic mistakes.

    The first… I have a habit of using die('die foo'); when troubleshooting php scripts… this is regrettable. It was Friday evening, there was a tiny bug. I isolated it by using die(‘die foo’). Applied the fix. Removed the line die(‘die foo’)… then some how between testing and committing this line found its way back into the code. Lead developer applied the patch to the live sites. For 48 hours 2500 sites displayed nothing apart from ‘die foo’…

    In my defense I fixed this at 6am Saturday morning when the CEO gave me a call. Unfortunately the lead developer went awol when he should have been working. I didn’t have the permission to apply the patch. Lead developer was sacked. I was commended for being around to write the fix. I didn’t mention I broke the sites in the first place. :)

    The second epic mistake… I had been working for maybe 4 months (still a bit of a noob) and a website selling houses told me that they needed to change the currency of their database records from one to another using todays exchange rates. They had more than a 100k records. I figured it was only a quick fix and didn’t need to back it up… you can guess where this going… I multiplied the house prices by the exchange rate and updated the currency to USD. I told them it was done and went off.

    Of course… what no one had told me was that this was a new front end. A month earlier they had an old site which supported multiple currencies and a fairly random way of storing currency values… thus… I had corrupted about 60% of house price values…

    The guy wasn’t happy. At the time I said that it was his fault. I had followed his brief, I had assessed the database (The first 200 rows at least) and determined what to do. The side effect of my actions was his fault as I was under his instruction. Some how he agreed. He paid me the full amount!? I then gave him a 50% refund as ‘good will’. He offered me work a month later. I made excuses figuring his site would be safer if I didn’t touch it… I know… I am evil.

    Should note I am awesome at what I do. The second mistake will never happen again as I backup everything. I now stop pressing ctrl+s before closing files so 1 shouldn’t happen again either :)
16. Joe

    I’ve used a couple of !important‘s in my CSS this week. No excuses, I was just too lazy to find the right line. :(
17. CBloss

    I got frustrated with IE and used a deprecated tag just for IE. I know, I know. Terrible, but I didn’t want to take the time to figure out why it wasn’t centering correctly.
18. Eric Wendelin

    I used obtrusive javascript recently because I didn’t want to have to merge some JS changes from CVS… never again, I promise
19. James Lin

    I was cocky enough to believe that @font-face just needed a simple .ttf file (as I saw Google Font Directory basically use). I thought I tested it on all the major browsers, but in hindsight maybe I didn’t. Let’s just say 10 million ad views later, I got many complaints about a really ugly ad… turns out the company’s ad server didn’t know how to correctly serve TTF files and I screwed up and didn’t offer .EOT version of the font for Internet Explorer to use.

    Sigh
20. peter eichhorst

    An old site didn’t have the username properly sanitized and the site was not tested thoroughly enough and got stung because of it this week…had to deal with boss… ouch
    On the newest site I am working on. I did much of the above comments… as well as alternating in an out of OOP…something that I thought was easier at the time is now making my site cluttered…need to fix!
21. Demo

    I had to design a request for some flash videos to support bitrate detection for……AOL & its little isp.

    ARRGRGGRRGRGGRGRGGGAAA…GWAGK

    The client isn’t always right unless there is more than 8grand involved in the holiday season.
22. Bilal Cinarli

    Stopped testing website for IE after bought a mac :evil:
23. Apple Marketing

    Started off some JS with great intentions of OOP. Deadline loomed and the result, I’m sure you can guess, is not pretty.

    Delved into proper namespacing and made some changes to a script on my site to make some kind of amends…
24. dysko

    Last week I used style attribute due my laziness… Please forgive me!
25. Callum Macrae Macrea

    I have a dedicated virtual machine just for IE. Not sure whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, I just use it for testing my “GET A BETTER BROWSER” popups. I guess they’re a sin, too XD

    I use die('test die') far too much, forgot to take when out when I committed my code and didn’t notice for a week (yes, that is how unpopular my project is).

    I hate design, but I love PHP. Unfortunately, as the two go together, I HAVE to design something. I have, on more than one occasion, based my website on someone elses, then changed it a bit. A few times, I have looked back at the original website and realised that it is exactly the same! :(

    But possibly worst of all, I used to use globals…

    ~Callum