I found code that calculated a single column in an HTML table. It was “last record created on”.

The algorithm was basically:

foreach account group
  foreach account in each account group
    foreach record in account.records
      if record.date > maxdate
        max = maxdate

It basically loaded every database record (the basic unit of record in this DATA COLLECTION SYSTEM) to find the newest one.

Customers couldn’t understand why the page took a minute to load.

It was easily replaced with a SQL query to get the max and it dropped down to a few ms.

The code was so hilariously stupid I left it commented out in the code so future developers could understand who built what they are maintaining.

“So what was the problem in the end?”

“Man, I don’t fucking know.”

• me, every goddamn time