I once had to look at a client’s code to determine if/how we’d go about taking over their application. Their only developer threatened to quit and this is when

I once had to look at a client’s code to determine if/how we’d go about taking over their application. Their only developer threatened to quit and this is when they realised it would be best to outsource this and reduce the bus factor. It was a huge folder (not repo - and there were zip files of different “versions” of the code in there). The main monster was a huge Visual Studio solution with hundreds of targets, one would be an application for entering some data, the other was for entering data from a hardware device (a scale if I remember right), etc. The main source of truth was an MSSQL database to which all these apps would connect as root. There is no backend as such to ensure access control & consistency, and any misbehaving app could essentially trash the entire DB. Database credentials were hardcoded in every app’s main entrypoint, with earlier “versions” of the credentials commented out below. I thought that surely these must be either staging DBs or at the very least there would be network-level access control meaning the DB wasn’t accessible from outside... but no - I managed to connect to their production DB as root from a random, untrusted location. I do not know if MSSQL uses encryption by default but I would bet good money there was none and they were essentially connecting to their DB as root, over plaintext, from hundreds of different locations across the country without any kind of VPN. In terms of code you obviously have your standard & expected “spaghetti monster” with UI & business logic scattered everywhere. What struck me the most was an empty exception handler around the main entrypoint. In the same folder there was also source for an iOS app. Didn’t look at it but I don’t see any valid reason why this should be in the same place as the Windows apps. Thankfully I no longer work there and even if I were I had no major C# experience (which gives me a very convenient excuse not to touch this mess).