As a web mobile computing major with 6 years of pre college experience with programming, how ondemand is being handled by programmers is deeply concerning.

Recently, the programmers have been clearly seen performing development on production. For people who aren't knowledgeable, when you code, you always code and test on a local copy of your machine and work issues out there before making it available for the public aka production

Some of these issues have been fixed, but they raise grave concern for the public:

Developing on prod as mentioned before

If your website contains testing do not order, they do not know how to boot a server to localhost for their testing purposes. This is already a huge red flag on how everything else falls into place. If a software engineer does not know how to test on localhost, is it like asking an engineer to build a building but not knowing how to do basic adds and subtracts.

General UI Glitches

This should have been fixed in a development environment, and also how does one screw up a page change? Libraries like React likely have a concept of state, and typescript exists so u don't accidentally set ur page to something invalid.

Poor Server Side Validation

This extends way back, where for some reason mobile ondemand would cache the page and the server wouldn't reject an order despite when there is a huge demand (button is disabled). I decided to test a theory on why this happened, and discovered that the server doesn't have a mechanism for rejecting orders. This bug has came back 1 time, but it should have been patched now.

Potential Vibe Coding

Amid the times of AI and a correlated loss of skill in proper software engineering, I highly suspect vibe coding is present with these ameteur mistakes that should not exist at all. Hallunicated code is not just buggy, it is dangerous. We have seen vibe code take down cloudflare, bug out windows, introduce CVEs.

Our society is increasingly reliant on digital infrastructure, and it is the duty of RIT to ensure their software is up to standard with proper programming ethics.

How to address this better

This sounds concerning, and frankly it is. Several ppl have told me the company that runs ondemand had their stocks tank a few years ago because of some incident. And now, with all this

The website does not appear to be up to rigorous web development standards. We are calling on RIT to stop pouring money into a service with low quality, and take the dip to invest in a service that is more high quality.

That could be opening up coop opporunities to redesign the parts or all of the dining system, or looking around the market for good alternatives.

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