Antipatterns

A comprehensive guide to recognizing and avoiding the worst practices in software development

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What You’ll Learn

Architecture Antipatterns

God Objects, Service Locators, Circular Dependencies, and more architectural nightmares

Security Vulnerabilities

OWASP Top 10 coverage including injection, broken auth, and security misconfigurations

Code Quality Issues

Monkey patching, magic numbers, callback hell, and unmaintainable code patterns

State Management

Global mutable state, feature flag chaos, and state synchronization nightmares

Error Handling

Swallowing errors, exposing stack traces, and every wrong way to handle failures

Database Design

God tables, SQL injection, N+1 queries, and data modeling disasters

About This Project

This documentation accompanies the “Worst Backend Ever” educational project - a codebase intentionally designed to demonstrate every antipattern imaginable.

Each section includes:

Real code examples from the project
Explanation of why it’s problematic
The right way to implement the same functionality
Detection tips for code reviews