A large company with facilities all over the Asia-Pacific region opted to modernize. They'd just finished a pile of internal development that extended the functionality of a 3rd party package, and they wanted to containerize the whole shebang.

That's where Fred came in, about 9 months into a 12 month effort. Things hadn't gone well, but a lot of the struggles were growing pains. Many of the containers were built as gigantic monoliths. A lot of the settings you might need to do a Kubernetes deployment weren't properly configured. It was a mess, but it wasn't a WTF, just a lot of work.

"Never trust your inputs" is a generally good piece of advice for software development. We can, however, get carried away.

Janice inherited a system which, among many other things, stores phone numbers. Like most such systems, the database validates phone numbers, and guarantees that numbers are stored in a canonical format, as text.

Penny uses a Python ORM. Like most ORMs, it involves a lot of "inherit from a BaseModel class, and get all your database access stuff for "free". Or at least, it used to. They've released an update.

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        if hasattr(self, "ACCESS_POLICY_VIEWSET_NAME"):
            deprecation_logger.warn(
                f"The model {self.__class__} defines the 'ACCESS_POLICY_VIEWSET_NAME' class "
                f"attribute which is no longer required and is discouraged to be set."
            )
        return super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)

Robert has inherited a .NET application. It's a big-ball-of-mud, full of monstrous classes of thousands of lines and no coherent purpose, complete with twenty constructors.

It's ugly and messy, but it's mostly just generically bad. This method, however, is a lot of bad choices in very few lines.