Web Dev · by Ananya Rao · 2026-10-28

Halloween edition: what's the scariest thing you've found in a legacy codebase?

It's almost Halloween so let's hear it. For me: a 4,000-line jQuery file called final_v2_REAL.js with a comment at the top that just says "don't".

29 sparks · 4 comments

Comments

a function called doEverything(). it did

a cron job that emailed the entire database as csv to an address that no longer existed. every night. for 6 years

Felix Weber · 10 likes

bouncing into the void with all the customer data. terrifying

// TODO: fix before launch
commit date 2014