No Indexes, No Parameters, No Problem

This story is from an organization I worked at a while back. A team had recently lost all of its developers after they voluntarily left the company. Big red flag - but I was young and eager to prove myself, so I volunteered to take it on. The app had a multitude of issues: poor separation of concerns, copy-pasted code everywhere, awful performance, and outdated tech I could probably write a whole series of posts on that application — it ended up costing me quite a bit of hair — but I wanted to talk about one of the craziest things I found. The Bug The first order of business was to fix the bugs that were preventing us from moving forward with customers that were using the software. There was a pretty standard create request that would fail somewhere inside of a 9,000 line function (yes... really...) for an unknown reason and customers were losing data. It had to be fixed. The debugging tooling was terrible. The server was at the company's data center with no remote debugger access, so