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Comment by BjornW | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for sharing! I wished more people would share code of projects they are no longer interested in. The educational value ('how did he/she built this') is worth a lot, regardless of the 'quality' of the code. Thank you!

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I've open-sourced a number of projects I was intending to keep closed-source, but gave up on.

One of them was SMOKE[1] - simple Python/Flask site with login. The most interesting part is probably the SMF Forum signature rotator[2], which manually parses HTML[3] that is not intended to be machine-readable.

[1]https://github.com/TazeTSchnitzel/SMOKE

[2]https://github.com/TazeTSchnitzel/SMOKE/blob/master/smoke/sm...

[3]https://github.com/TazeTSchnitzel/SMOKE/blob/master/smoke/sm...

I have the exact same sentiment; I pretty much open source all of my old projects for people to learn from (I taught a small meetup for a while, it was useful to explain both the good and the bad). I add DEFUNCT to the description if they are really old or have a lot of bad practices. Here's the rest: https://github.com/tlhunter

That's an excellent idea. I should go add that to some of my horrible, horrible C code, lest someone think that 10 levels of indentation, not using c-style strings, non-portability, architecture assumptions, lack of error checking, and blocking sockets is a good idea...

Or that macros without bounds checking that cause segfaults unless debugging is a good idea...

What was I thinking?

Heh, I'm not well versed in C, but it sounds scary.

You can also throw comments in the code where the bad stuff is so that it has more visibility, as well as suggestions for how to better solve the problem. Sometimes people learn best from bad code!

Good idea.

It should sound scary, it's the worst code I've ever written.

I wrote it 2 years ago with the idea "working first, correct later", but I haven't finished the latter yet...

I've spent many an hour staring at somebody else's code. I love it, but so often when I'm in the middle of a project I totally forget about those time's I've seen code that made me go "wow, I should do that."

Am I doing something wrong? Notes or something?

i've been trying to put unused stuff on my github https://github.com/th0ma5w and i've received great comments, and people thanking me for showing general concepts and such, so that's been really great to hear, especially from crap i just had sitting around at dead ends.

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