What code some developers still regret

ByAndrés Moreira

To Bill Sourour, a company manager, there is a work I regret saying "I should have made it to that code" when I was one of the developers. Sourour talks on his own blog about the code which influenced life so much that it came to think twice about the influence of the code after this.

The code I 'm still ashamed of
https://medium.freecodecamp.com/the-code-im-still-ashamed-of-e4c021dff55e


Bill Sourour wrote the code for the first time at the age of six and started part-time at a father's company who was a consultant when he was 15 years old. And at the age of 21 I got a coding job at a market research firm in Toronto.

The founder of this company was a doctor and many of the clients were pharmaceutical companies. In Canada, Mother Sourour's home country, the pharmaceutical company has strict restrictions on the promotion of prescription medicines for consumers, so the pharmaceutical company was making a website with information on each medicine.

One project to which Mr. Sourour was allocated is "drug for teenage women", and on the site of medicine, when answering quizzes, recommended medicine corresponding to the answer is displayed It was getting. Mr. Sourour received the specification included up to the question of the quiz, but, at the end of the quiz, only the answer as to what kind of medicine to display is missing. In this regard, the account manager inquired the client, Sourour began to develop again.

However, just before the site was completed and submitted to the client, the project manager pointed out "Quiz does not work properly". The content of the indication was "Whatever answer to the quiz, client's medicine will be displayed as the best answer." Actually, this was due to "requests" received by Sourour. The project manager who heard about that said "Oh, I see, it is cool, is not it?", The story seems to have ended.

Mr. Sourour is regretting that I have ridden the marketing while understanding that "This site recommends client specific drugs". In fact, the client seems to have had a dinner very satisfied with the site, but in the shadow, Mr. Sourour committed suicide by her colleague, a girl who used medicine posted on the site I was informed of the news. Because there was a side effect that causes drug depression and suicide urge, even now lawsuits continue with the former patient. My colleague did not show up at the dinner party, but Sourour managed to take part in the dinner party while smiling.

Just as Sourour 's sister was also 19 when he was prescribed this medicine and Mr. Sourour told me that he is a medicine making a site at work so do not rush to call her in a hurry I told my sister that she used medicine. After a while from the dinner party, Mr. Sourour left the company.

Actually, Mr. Sourour seems to have been worried that the aim is to deceive girls when seeing the client's request for the first time, but in the end it seems that "because it is a job to do" I did it.

But "our developers are one of the last line of defense when doing potentially dangerous and immoral things," Sourour says. Currently there is an AI program to help medical doctors analyze disease, it should not take long for the program to make prescriptions. In doing so, Mr. Sourour insists that it is important to reflect our ethics in the code as well.

Since one case, Mr. Sourour said that he twice think about the influence of the code he wrote. This way of thinking may be necessary for those who write the code.