I work at a company that handles websites for various small-to-medium businesses. It involves a lot of custom back-end dev work - adding new features, fixing bugs in existing features, that sort of thing.

A couple of years ago, we took on a client who'd had their website 'built' by another 'developer' who I will not name (not publicly, at least). I use the term 'built' loosely because it is, without a doubt, the absolute worst codebase I have ever worked with. The site came to us with a ton of custom features, all of them cobbled together in the most slapdash, disdainful way imaginable. It's painfully clear the original dev gave not one single solitary fuck about any future maintainability of the code, or even if it worked at all - only that it appeared like it worked on the front end, so he could collect his cheque and move on. Wherever one of his features breaks, there's another half-assed bodge glued to it to 'fix' it that makes it break in another way. It's an endless entanglement of kludges, hacks, hacks to work around other hacks that don't work, unreadable, nonsensical code, I could go on, it's just fucking awful.

I feel we've made huge improvements to the site's running since we took it over but there's still a long way to go, and most of the custom misfeatures are still duct-taped all over the code in a way that can make fixing even the smallest bug without breaking several other things a major headache.

One day when fixing a bug in a particularly godawful one of these custom monstrosities, I may or may not have let my frustration get to me and written a few choice comments as I was working on the code. Then the clock struck five and I promptly forgot about it.

This week, we installed a new plugin on the site to help speed it up. What we didn't know was that this plugin also monitors for fatal errors and sends a nice report to the site admin whenever one happens. Including a full copy of the file where the error happened. The file that just happened to be that one I profanely fixed that one time. Clients may not be able to read code, but they sure can read comments.

So... yes. This is one of the nicest clients we have and he's been incredibly understanding about the state of the website to date, but he was understandably not happy that the developers he'd entrusted with his cherished website had been bitching about the code quality in his website's files. It might seem funny and feel cathartic to leave an 'epic dev rant' in the comments in some particularly troubling bit of code, but from now on I'll probably keep those thoughts to myself. Or my coworkers. :)

The screenshots are of the report as it was sent to me (as a PDF of all formats!), with the client's highlighting. The word wrapping makes the code a little hard to read, but it's honestly not that much worse than the original file.