CodeSOD: Butting In

Initech is a large, international corporation. Any time you're doing business at a global scale, you're going to need to contend with a language barrier sooner or later. This makes employees who are multilingual valuable.

Dana recently joined Initech, and in the first week, was warned about Jerry. Jerry was the "chief" "architect" and team "lead", and was one of those special, valuable employees who spoke three languages. Correction, "spoke" needs scare quotes too, because Jerry was incomprehensible in every language he spoke, including his native tongue.

Jerry's emails were stuff of legend around the office. Punctuation was included, not to structure sentences, but as a kind of decoration, just to spice up his communiques. Capitalization was applied at random. Sentences weren't there to communicate a single thought or idea, but to express fragments of half considered dreams.

Despite being the "chief architect", Jerry's code was about as clear as his emails. His class definitions were rambling stretches of unrelated functionality, piled together into a ball of mud. Splattered through it all were blocks of commented out functionality. And 99.9% of his commits to master had syntax errors.

Why did his commits always have syntax errors? Jerry had never seen fit to install a C++ compiler on his machine, and instead pushed to master and let their CI system compile and find all his syntax errors. He'd then amend the commit to fix the errors, and woe betide anyone else working in the repo, because he'd next git push --force the amended commit. Then he'd fix the new round of syntax errors.

Their organization did have an official code review standard, but since no one understood any of Jerry's code, and Jerry was the "chief", Jerry reviewed his own code.

So, let's talk about enumerated types. A common practice in C++ enums is to include an extra value in the enum, just to make it easy to discover the size of the enum, like so:

enum Color { COLOR_RED, COLOR_BLACK, COLOR_BLUE, COLOR_SIZE}

COLOR_SIZE isn't actually a color value, but it tells you how many color values there are. This can be useful when working with a large team, as it's a sort of form of documentation. It also allows patterns like, `for (int i = 0; i < COLOR_SIZE; i++)"`. Of course, it only works when everyone follows the same convention.

Jerry couldn't remember the convention. So, in his native language, he invented a new one: he'd end all his enums with a _END instead of _SIZE. But Jerry also couldn't remember what the English word for "end" was. So he went off to Google Translate, and got an English translation.

Then he wrote code. Lots of code. No one got to review this code. Jerry touched everything, without worrying about what any other developer was doing.

This meant that before long, every enum in the system looked like this:

enum Color { COLOR_RED, COLOR_BLACK, COLOR_BLUE, COLOR_BUTT}

Eventually, Jerry left Initech. He'd found a position where he could be a CTO of a well-funded startup. The very same day, Dana submitted her largest pull request ever, where she removed every single one of Jerry's butts.

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