$str = str_replace(array("\{","\}")," ",$str);

//Replaces with spaces the braces in cases where braces in places cause stasis

saw an SSIS project once used for basically string replacement and file tasks. Asked manager permission to rewrite this Proof of Concept to something more suitable language.
manager: you can't but you have to support it.
me: but i tought it's a PoC
manager: yes it is
me: so what to support?
manager: it's been sold to a customer and in production for 6 months now
So it's a PoC which is sold and moved to prod...
I hate sales and management douches sometimes... like 98% of the time....
(already left the company)

Still as a scholar who has had his intership I decided that I was finally confident enough in my ability to apply for a small part-time programming job. I had an internship at a cool exhausting place with tons of expertise and I've proven myselve over there. So now I wanted a job on the side. Nothing special, just something that would make a little money with programming instead of washing dishes at the restaurant.

So I started at this small internet based startup (2 or 3 progammers) as a backend-oriented programmer. The working hours were amazingly compatible with my school schedule.

The lead dev also sounded like a smart guy. He had worked as a backend guy for years and had code running on verry critical public infrastructure that if it were to fail we'd be evacuated from our homes.

As a first asignment I got an isolated task to make an importer for some kind of file format that needed integration. So I asked for access to the code. I didn't get it since they were going to re-do the entire backend based on the code I wrote. I just needed to parse the file in a usable object structure. So I found out that the file format was horrible and made a quite nice set of objects that were nice. At the end of the first week or so I asked if I could get access to the code again, so I could integrate it. Answer was no. The lead dev would do that. I could however get access to my private repository.

Next week a new intern was taken to build a multiplatform responsive app. Only downside was that all the stuff he had ever done was php based websites. It wasn't going anywhere anytime soon, but I figured that that was where internships were for. So I ended up helping him a lot and taught him some concepts of OOP and S.O.L.I.D. and the occasional 30 minute rants of IndexOutOfRangeException, ArgumentException and such.

So one day he asked me how to parse a json string and retrieve a specific field out of it.
I gave him something like the following to start with:
"
JObject json;
if(!JObject.TryParse(jsonString, out json))
{
//handle error
}
string value;
if(!json.tryget("foo", out value).../// code continues
"

but then the main dev stepped in and proposed the following since it wouldn't crash on an API change:
"
dynamic json = new JObject(jsonString);
string value = json.myJsonValue;
"

After me trying to explain to him that this was a bad choise for about 15 minutes because of all kinds of reasons I just gave up. I was verry mad that this young boy was forced to use bad programming pracises while he was clearly still learning. I know I shouldn't pick up certain practises. But that boy didn't.

Almost everytime the main dev was at the office I had such a mindboggling experience.

After that I got a new assignment.
I had to write another xml file format parser.
Of course I couldn't have any access to our current code because... it was unnecesary. We were going to use my code as a total replacement for the backend again.
And for some reason classes generated from XSD weren't clear enough so after carefull research I literally wrapped xsd generated code in equivalent classes.

At that moment, I realized I made some code that was totally useless since it wasn't compatible with any form of their API or any of the other backend code. (I haven't seen their API. I didn't have access to the source.) And since I could've just pushed them generated XSD's that would've produced thesame datastructure I felt like I was a cheat. I also didn't like that I wasn't allowed to install even the most basic tooling. (git client or, Ide refactoring plugins, spelling checker etc...)

Now I was also told that I couldn't discuss issues with the new guy anymore since it was a waste of my valuable time, and they were afraid that I taught him wrong concepts.

This was the time that my first paycheck came in so I quitted my job.
I haven't seen any of the features that I've worked on. :)

String char replacement in C++ (according to SO):

Boost - replace_all(str1, str2);
C++ STL - 12 lines of code to iterate over the length of the string and store the result in a <char> vector.

Noooooooope. Thank God for Boost.

Pretty niche tool, but Sencha Architect!
It is a wanna be GUI-Builder/IDE for ExtJS, but neither works properly.
This rant is not about ExtJS, just about Sencha Architect, which my coworkers and I were forced to use.
If you want to join the ride, here an excerpt of just some of the issues:

- installation: already the setup is more of a gamble than an actual setup, either it works on your machine or it doesn't, plain and simple

- GUI Builder: just drag and dropping components is actually nice, but the editing capabilities are frustrating, you can't edit the UI code by hand at all, just through pre defined properties. If there was the need to really mix things up it wasn't possible, I couldn't even rebuild shown examples of their ExtJS documentation. Furthermore the property editor was data type locked, which means if you want to enter a string which ExtJS already supports, but architect locks the value as a boolean, you can't edit it at all, while still using Architect

- code editing: well it is a colored texteditor, which is fine, and I could live with that, but Architect let's you just edit areas where it allows you to - want to change something else? Nope not allowed

- autocompletion: there is none at all, same goes for refactoring, multi highlighting, string replacement, and others

- code storing: well now some may think edit it somewhere else, well no, also not possible... Architect not just only saves simple js, there is also a Json formatted file for everything you have created, which is needed so the tool can actually load it for further editing. They possibly never heard of DRY. But the worst of this code storing was actually using git along with it - have a merge conflict? Merge both files! Every single time, it was so damn tedious

There are a few more, but these were the worst I can remember.
Luckily I don't have to use it anymore!
Maybe they have fixed or changed a lot of it, because the developers were aware of the issues and eager to resolve them, as far as I was told on a roadmap presentation. And some of the tools they had released in the end of my time using ExtJS were actually really good, like an IDE plugin for the framework, and I liked using it.