What's the worst code you've ever written?

What's the worst code you've ever written... yet.

In 2008 I participated in a graphing calculator challenge where the goal was to convert a numeric input into word form (e.g. 1002 to "one thousand two"). I didn't understand algorithms at the time, so the code was a mass of if statements determining what each part of the screen should print, rather than concatenating a string.

The screen wasn't big enough to handle output that way, so the "and" was... creatively placed.

(I still won though because my program was the fastest... turns out calculators executed loops very slowly, so my not using them gave me an edge!)

At the beginning of my career, I was fond of one-liners and compactness, with all the disregard of white spaces, meaningful variable names and readability all around.
I don't really know if the code was either crappy, genius or average, because I had no idea of what that meant: it was completely obscure to myself in a couple of months.

My code used to look like a regular expression.

Any time I've had to work on really bad legacy code where I can't confidently change any existing code, but I can pile some crap on the top somewhere if there's a problem. It just keeps getting worse and worse and worse and eventually you leave the project and somebody else takes the routine.

Boss: Try to track page views on our website, but also try to avoid making a database trip on every single page load.

Me: Say no more.

from random import randint
if randint(0,16) == 16:
  model.view_count += 16
  model.save()

Didn’t know React but was called in to do some last minute changes which needs to be committed under a deadline.

Using location.reload() to refresh the browser after a react state change that wasn’t rendering the intended component.

Got so sick in the stomach writing it. Had to purge it from git history so it never exist. Spend the weekend learning React proper.

It felt dirty. I never fully recovered.

Probably the funniest and scarest thing I ever did was write a 1 line C app in my freshmen C class. We were learning how to submit keyboard events. So I thought it would be funny to write an app that captured ctrl-alt-delete and call it from autoexe and see how long it would take someone to figure it out... and hit ctrl-c to stop it. Well, they freaked out and thought it was a virus and the prof formatted every computer in the lab and reinstalled everything from scratch. Then the univerisity put up notices in every computer lab and they created some new article in the student handbook about putting viruses on univerisity computers. Needless to say... I never mentioned it again.

Early in my webdev life I really didn't grasp the concept of GET vs POST. I wrote some really bad/insecure code which attempted to submit huge amounts of data via URL params.

I once wrote a primitive ES3 lexical parser in PHP meant to filter out comments and bundle JS files (a few years before node.js was released).

It resulted in errors because it had concatenated jQuery, which used an IEFE, with another IEFE without a semicolon in between, an edge case that I had overseen during development. It took me almost 1½ days to find and fix that error.

A SQL script that deletes all tables, views, everything.
Executed by mistake (my first days at work).
My mates pranked me.