That coding bootcamp meetup in Austin almost cost me my project

I went to a free coding workshop downtown Austin last month. The instructor told everyone to blindly copy-paste a huge block of jQuery from a shared drive. Two days later my whole portfolio site froze because it had a hidden loop that ate up memory. Has anyone else had a bad experience using code from random meetup groups?

2 comments

2 Comments

dakota47927d ago

Man I had almost the exact same thing happen at a meetup in Denver last year. Someone shared a "helpful" script that looked fine but had a setTimeout loop that just kept piling up calls. What worked for me was just deleting everything I got from that session and rewriting my whole project from scratch using plain JavaScript and a few well known libraries. I also started testing every single piece of code in a sandbox before adding it to anything important, even if it came from a reputable source. Now I always ask to see the actual code running first or run it in a separate test environment before touching my live site.

elliotw3726d ago

Wait wait wait. The instructor told you to just copy paste a huge block of code from a shared drive? That is genuinely insane to me. Like, no walkthrough, no explanation, just "here grab this blob of jQuery and drop it in"? I would have noped out of there so fast. Even if they had good intentions, that's basically asking for a backdoor or a memory leak to get planted in your project. I had a guy at a hackathon once share a "quick fix" that turned out to have a hidden crypto miner in it. Makes you wonder how many other people's sites got bricked from that same workshop.