I recently revisited some of the earliest web code I ever wrote, which was in PHP 5.5 (about 7 years old, I think). I wasn't surprised by all the mistakes I made, both from being a newbie programmer and from making what I think were fairly easy-to-make PHP mistakes. After all, every tutorial I could find back then used mysql, didn't used real_escape_string, etc. What was surprising was how hard I had to dig now, 7 ye…
I was in the Java world for many years, and found it to be incredibly easy to write 'bad' code. Sure it looked OK, but whenever there was a problem... i would just have people telling me it was 'wrong' and 'bad', but rarely ever any 'good' way to do something, short of entirely rebuilding in someone else's preferred library/framework/stack.
Loads of "well, that never happens to me", "works fine", etc. Was it tomcat? which version? was it one of the 95 dependencies interacting with tomcat in a way no one had ever hit? Oh shit - you're using tomcat? WTF? Glassfish/jetty/jboss are the only 'real' tools to use... etc.