The Daily WTF

Years ago, Brian had a problem: their C# application would crash sometimes. What was difficult to understand was why it was crashing, because it wouldn't crash in response to a user action, or really, any easily observable action.The basic flow was that the users used a desktop application. Many operations that the users wanted to perform were time consuming, so the application spun up background tasks to do them, thus allowing the user to do other things within the application. And sometimes, the application would just crash, both when the user hadn't done anything, and when all background jobs should have been completed.The way the background task was launched was this:

The first time Z hit the captcha on his company's site, he didn't think much of it. And to be honest, the second time he wasn't paying that much attention. So it wasn't until the third time that he realized that the captcha had showed him the same image every single time- a "5" with lines scribbled all over it.That led Z to dig out the source and see how the captcha was implemneted.

"Getting ready to!" anticipatedrichard h. but then this happened."All I want are the CLI options to mark the stupid TOS box so I can install this using our Chef automation. "What are the options" is too much to ask, apparently.But this is Microsoft. Are stupid errors like this really that unexpected?"

Everyone's got workplace woes. The clueless manager; the disruptive coworker; the cube walls that loom ever higher as the years pass, trapping whatever's left of your soul.But sometimes, Satan really leaves his mark on a joint. I worked Tech Support there. You may remember The C-Level Ticket. I'm Anonymous. This is my story. Night after night, my dreams are full of me trying and failing at absolutely everything. Catch a bus? I'm already running late and won't make it. Dial a phone number to get help? I can't recall the memorized sequence, and the keypad's busted anyway. Drive outta danger? The car won't start. Run from a threat? My legs are frozen.Then I wake up in my bed in total darkness, scared out of my skull, and I can't move for real. Not one muscle works. Even if I could move, I'd stay still because I'm convinced the smallest twitch will give me away to the monster lurking nearby, looking to do me in.The alarm nags me before the sun's even seen fit to show itself. What day is it? Tuesday? An invisible, overwhelming dread pins me in place under the covers. I can't do it. Not again.The thing is, hunger, thirst, and cold are even more nagging than the alarm. Dead tired, I force myself up anyway to do the whole thing over.The office joe that morning was so over-brewed as to be sour. I tossed down the last swig in my mug, checking my computer one more time to make sure no Tech Support fires were raging by instant message or email. Then I threw on my coat and hat and quit my cube, taking the stairs to ground level.I pushed open a heavy fire-escape door and stepped out into the narrow alley between two massive office buildings. Brisk autumn air and the din of urban motor traffic rushed to greet me. The dull gray sky above threatened rain. Leaning against the far brick wall were Toby and Reynaldo, a couple of network admins, hugging themselves as they nursed smoldering cigarettes. They nodded hello. I tipped my hat in greeting, slipping toward the usual spot, a patch of asphalt I'd all but worn grooves in by that point. I lit my own cigarette and took in a deep, warming draw. "Make it last another year," Toby spoke in a mocking tone, tapping ash onto the pavement. "I swear, that jerk can squeeze a nickel until Jefferson poops!"An ambulance siren blared through the alley for a minute. The rig was no doubt racing toward the hospital down the street.Reynaldo smirked. "You think Morty finally did it?"Toby smirked as well.I raised an eyebrow. "Did what?""Morty always says he's gonna run out into traffic one of these days so they can take him to the hospital and he won't have to be here," Reynaldo explained.I frowned at the morbid suggestion. "Hell of a way to catch a break.""Well, it's not like we can ask for time off," Toby replied bitterly. "They always find some way to rope us back in."I nodded in sympathy. "You have it worse than we do. But my sleep's still been jacked plenty of times by 3AM escalated nonsense that shoulda been handled by a different part of the globe."Reynaldo's eyes lit up fiercely. "They have all the same access and training, but it never falls on them! Yeah, been there."The door swung open again, admitting a young woman with the weight of the world on her shoulders. This was Megan, a junior developer and recent hire. I tipped my hat while helping myself to another drag.She hastened my way, pulling a pack of cigarettes from her handbag. With shaking hands, she fumbled to select a single coffin nail. "I quit these things!" she lamented. After returning the pack to her bag, she rummaged through it fruitlessly. "Dammit, where are those matches?!" She glanced up at me with a pleading expression. I pulled the lighter from my coat pocket. "You sure?"She nodded like she hadn't been more sure about anything in her entire life.I lit it for her. She took a lung-filling pull, then exhaled a huge cloud of smoke."Goin' that well, huh?" I asked.Megan also hugged herself, her expression pained. "Every major player in the industry uses our platform, and I have no idea how it hasn't all come crashing down. There are thousands of bugs in the code base. Thousands! It breaks all the time. Most of the senior devs have no clue what they're doing. And now we're about to lose the only guy who understands the scheduling algorithm, the most important thing!""That's tough." I had no idea what else to say. Maybe it was enough that I listened.Megan glanced up nervously at the brewing storm overhead. "I just know that algorithm's gonna get dumped in my lap.""The curse of competence." I'd seen it plenty of times."Ain't that the truth!" She focused on me again with a look of apology. "How've you been?"I shrugged. "Same old, same old." I figured a fresh war story might help. "Had to image and set up the tech for this new manager's onboarding. Her face is stuck in this permanent glare. Every time she opens her mouth, it's to bawl someone out.""Ugh.""The crazy thing is, the walls of her office are completely covered with crucifixes, and all these posters plastered with flowers and hearts and sap like Choose Kindness." I leaned in and lowered my voice. "You know what I think? I think she's an ancient Roman whose spite has kept her alive for over two thousand years. Those crosses are a threat!"That teased a small laugh out of Megan. For a moment, the amusement reached her eyes. Then it was gone, overwhelmed by worry. She took to pacing through the narrow alley. Back at my cube, I found a new urgent ticket at the top of my case load. Patricia Dracora, a senior project manager, had put in a call claiming her computer had been hacked. Her mouse cursor was moving around and clicking things all on its own.It was too early in the morning for a case like this. That old dread began sneaking up on me again. The name put me on edge as well. Over the years, our paths had never crossed, but her nickname throughout Tech Support, Dracula, betrayed what everyone else made of her."Make like a leaf and blow!"The boss barked his stern command over my shoulder. I stood and turned from my computer to find him at my cubicle threshold with arms folded, blocking my egress.I couldn't blow, so I shrugged. "Can't be as bad as The Crucifier.""Dracula's worse than The Crucifier," the boss replied under his breath in a warning tone. "For your own good, don't keep her waiting!" He tossed a thumb over his shoulder for good measure.When he finally backed out of the way, I made tracks outta there. A few of my peers made eye contact as I passed, looking wary on my behalf.The ticket pegged Dracora's office in a subfloor I'd never set foot in before. Descending the stairs, I had too much time to think. Of course I didn't expect a real hacking attempt. Peripheral hardware on the fritz, some software glitch: there'd be a simple explanation. What fresh hell would I have to endure to reach that point? That was what my tired brain couldn't let go of. The stimulants hadn't kicked in yet. With the strength of a kitten, I was stepping into a lion's den. A lion who might make me wish for crucifixion by the time it was all over.From the stairwell, I entered a dank, deserted corridor. Old florescent lighting fixtures hummed and flickered overhead. That, combined with the overwhelming stench of paint fumes, set the stage for a ripping headache. There were no numbers on the walls to lead me to the right place. They must've taken them down to paint and never replaced them. I inched down worn, stained carpeting, peeking into each open gap I found to either side of me. Nothing but darkness, dust, and cobwebs at first. Eventually, I spotted light blaring from one of the open doors ahead of me. I jogged the rest of the way, eager to see any living being by that point.The room I'd stumbled onto was almost closet-sized. It contained a desk and chair, a laptop docking station, and a stack of cardboard boxes on the floor. Behind the desk was a woman of short stature, a large purse slung over one shoulder. Her arms were folded as she paced back and forth in the space behind her chair. When I appeared, she stopped and looked to me wide-eyed, maybe just as relieved as I was. "Are you Tech Support?""Yes, ma'am." I entered the room. "What's-?""I don't know how it happened!" Dracora returned to pacing, both hands making tight fists around the straps of the purse she was apparently too wired and distracted to set down. "They made me move here from the fourth floor. I just brought everything down and set up my computer, and now someone has control of the mouse. Look, look!" She stopped and pointed at the monitor.I rounded the desk. By the time I got there, whatever she'd seen had vanished. Onscreen, the mouse cursor sat still against a backdrop of open browsers and folders. Nothing unusual."It was moving, I swear!" Anguished, Dracora pleaded with me to believe her.It seemed like she wasn't hostile at all, just stressed out and scared. I could handle that. "I'm sure we can figure this out, ma'am. Lemme have a look here."I sat down at the desk and tried the wireless mouse first. It didn't work at all to move the cursor."The hacker's locked us out!" Dracora returned to pacing behind me.As I sat there, not touching a thing, the mouse cursor shuttled across the screen like it was possessed."There! You see?"Suddenly, somehow, my brain smashed everything together. "Ma'am, I have an idea. Could you please stand still?"Dracora stopped.I swiveled around in the chair to face her. "Ma'am, you said you were moving in down here. What's in your purse right now?"Her visible confusion deepened. "What?""The mouse cursor only moves around when you do," I explained.Her eyes widened. She dug deeply into her purse. A moment later, she pulled out a second wireless mouse. Then she looked to me like she couldn't believe it. "That's it?!""That's it!" I replied."Oh, lord!" Dracora replaced the dud sitting on her mousepad with the mouse that was actually connected to her machine, wilting over the desk as she did so. "I don't know whether to laugh or cry."I knew the feeling. But the moment of triumph, I gotta admit, felt pretty swell. "Anything else I can help with, ma'am?""No, no! I've wasted enough of your time. Thank you so much!"I had even more questions on the way back upstairs. With this huge, spacious office building, who was forcing Dracora to be in that pit? How had she garnered such a threatening reputation? Why had my experience been so different from everyone else's? I didn't mention it to the boss or my peers. I broke it all down to Megan in the alley a few days later."She even put in a good word for me when she closed the ticket," I told her. "The boss says I'm on the fast track for another promotion." I took a drag from my cigarette, full of bemusement. "I'm already as senior as it gets. The only way up from here is management." I shook my head. "That ain't my thing. Look how well it's gone for Dracora."Megan lowered her gaze, eyes narrowed. "You said it yourself: the only reward for good work is more work."And then they buried you ... in a basement, or a box.I remembered being at the start of my career, like Megan. I remembered feeling horrified by all the decades standing between me and the day when I wouldn't or couldn't ever work again. A couple decades in, some part of me that I'd repressed had resurfaced. What the hell is this? What have I been doing?Stop caring, a different part replied. Just stop caring. Take things day by day, case by case.I'd obeyed for so long. Where had it gotten me?Under my breath, I risked airing my wildest wish for the future. "Someday, I wanna break outta this joint."Megan blinked up at me. I had her attention. "How?""I dunno," I admitted. "I gotta figure it out ... before I go nuts." [Advertisement] Utilize BuildMaster to release your software with confidence, at the pace your business demands. Download today!

Way back in 1964, people were starting to recgonize that computers were going to have a large impact on the world. There was not, at the time, very much prepackaged software, which meant if you were going to use a computer to do work, you were likely going to have to write your own programs. The tools to do that weren't friendly to non-mathematicians.Thus, in 1964, was BASIC created, a language derived from experiments with languages like DOPE (The Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment). The goal was to be something easy, something that anyone could use.In 1977, the TRS-80, the Commodore PET, and the Apple II all launched, putting BASIC into the hands of end users. But it's important to note that BASIC had already been seeing wide use for a decade on "big iron" systems, or more hobbyist systems, like the Altair 8800.Today's submitter, Coyne, was but a humble student in 1977, and despite studying at a decent university, brand spanking new computers were a bit out of reach. Coyne was working with professors to write code to support papers, and using some dialect of BASIC on some minicomputer.One of Coyne's peers had written a pile of code, and one simple segment didn't work. As it was just a loop to print out a series of numbers, it seemed like it should work, and work quite easily. But the programmer writing it couldn't get it to work. They passed it around to other folks in the department, and those folks also couldn't get it to work. What could possibly be wrong with this code?

For C programmers of a certain age (antique), booleans represent a frustrating challenge. But with the addition of stdbool.h, we exited the world of needing to work hard to interact with boolean values. While some gotchas are still in there, your boolean code has the opportunity to be simple.Mark's predecessor saw how simple it made things, and decided that wouldn't do. So that person went and wrote their own special way of comparing boolean values. It starts with an enum:

Back in the antediluvian times, when I was in college, people still used floppy disks to work on their papers. This was a pretty untenable arrangement, because floppy disks lost data all the time, and few students had the wherewithal to make multiple copies. Half my time spent working helldesk was breaking out Norton Diskutils to try and rescue people's term papers. To avoid this, the IT department offered network shares where students could store documents. The network share was backed up, tracked versions, and could be accessed from any computer on campus, including the VAX system (in fact, it was stored on the VAX).I bring this up because we have known for quite some time that companies and governments need to store documents in centrally accessible locations so that you're not reliant on end users correctly managing their files. And if you are a national government, you have to make a choice: either you contract out to a private sector company, or you do it yourself.South Korea made the choice to do it themselves, with their G-Drive system (short for Government Drive, no relation to Google Drive), a government file store hosted primarily out of a datacenter in Daejeon. Unfortunately, "primarily" is a bit too apropos- last month, a fire in that datacenter destroyed data.

It's been several years now that our reliable contributor Daniel D.has been sending us the same gripe time after time. We get it, really we do. It irks us too,but it is astounding just how many times he's been able to find this!

Konrad was trying to understand how an input form worked, and found this validation function.

Anthony found this solution to handling 404 errors which um... probably shouldn't have been found.

Joseph was doing a refactoring effort, merging some duplicated functions into one, cleaning up unused Java code that really should have been deleted ages ago, and so on. But buried in that pile of code that needed cleaning up, Joseph found this little bit of code, to validate that an input was a percentage.

Carl was debugging a job management script. The first thing that caught his attention was that the script was called file.bat. They were running on Linux.The second thing he noticed, was that the script was designed to manage up to 999 jobs, and needed to simply roll job count over once it exceeded 999- that is to say, job 1 comes after job 999.Despite being called file.bat, it was in fact a Bash script, and thus did have access to the basic mathematical operations bash supports. So while this could have been done via some pretty basic arithmetic in Bash, doing entirely in Bash would have meant not using Awk. And if you know how to use Awk, why would you use anything but Awk?

Cool cat Adam R. commented"I've been getting a bunch of messages from null in my WhatsApp hockey group."

We all know the perils of bad date handling, and Claus was handed an annoying down bug in some date handling.The end users of Claus's application do a lot of work in January. It's the busiest time of the year for them. Late last year, one of the veteran users raised a warning: "Things stop working right in January, and it creates a lot of problems."Unfortunately, that was hardly a bug report. "Things stop working?" What does that even mean. Claus's team made a note of it, but no one thought too much about it, until January. That's when a flood of tickets came in, all relating to setting a date.Now, this particular date picker didn't default to having dates, but let the users pick values like "Start of last month", or "Same day last year", or "Same day next month". And the trick to the whole thing was that sometimes setting dates worked just fine, sometimes it blew up, and it seemed to vary based on when you were setting the dates and what dates you were setting.And let's take a look at one example of how this was implemented, which highlights why January was such a problem:

Dear Third-Party API Support,You're probably wondering how and why your authorization server has been getting hammered every single day for more than 4 years. It was me. It was us-the company I work for, I mean. Let me explain.I'm an Anonymous developer at Initech. We have this one mission-critical system which was placed in production by the developer who created it, and then abandoned. Due to its instability, it received frequent patches, but no developer ever claimed ownership. No one ever took on the task of fixing its numerous underlying design flaws.About 6 months ago, I was put in charge of this thing and told to fix it. There was no way I could do it on my own; I begged management for help and got 2 more developers on board. After we'd released our first major rewrite and fix, there were still a few lingering issues that seemed unrelated to our code. So I began investigating the cause.This system has 10+ microservices which are connected like meatballs buried deep within a bowl of spaghetti that completely obscures what those meatballs are even doing. Untangling this code has been a chore in and of itself. Within the 3 microservices dedicated to automated tasks, I found a lot of random functionality ... and then I found this!See, our system extracts data from your API. It takes the refresh token, requests a new access token, and saves it to our database. Our refresh token to this system is only valid for 24 hours; as soon as we get access, we download the data. Before we download the data, we ensure we have a valid access token by refreshing it.One of our microservice's pointless jobs was to refresh the access token every 5, 15, and 30 minutes for 22 of the 24 hours we had access to it. It was on a job timer, so it just kept going. Every single consent for that day kept getting refreshed, over and over.Your auditing tools must not have revealed us as the culprit, otherwise we should've heard about this much sooner. You've probably wasted countless hours of your lives sifting through log files with a legion of angry managers breathing down your necks. I'm writing to let you know we killed the thing. You won't get spammed again on our watch. May this bring you some closure.Sincerely,A Developer Who Still Cares [Advertisement] Keep the plebs out of prod. Restrict NuGet feed privileges with ProGet. Learn more.

Joe recently worked on a financial system for processing loans. Like many such applications, it started its life many, many years ago. It began as an Oracle Forms application in the 90s. By the late 2000s, Oracle was trying to push people away from forms into their newer tools, like Oracle ApEx (Application Express), but this had the result of pushing people out of Oracle's ecosystem and onto their own web stacks.The application Joe was working on was exactly that. Now, no one was going to migrate off of an Oracle database, especially because 90% of their business logic was wired together out of PL/SQL packages. But they did start using Java for developing their UI, and then at some other point, started using Liquibase for helping them maintain and manage their schema.The thing about a three decade old application is that it often collects a lot of kruft. For example, this procedure:

SQL Server Integration Services is Microsoft's ETL tool. It provides a drag-and-drop interface for describing data flows from sources to sinks, complete with transformations and all sorts of other operations, and is useful for migrating data between databases, linking legacy mainframes into modern databases, or doing what most people seem to need: migrating data into Excel spreadsheets.It's essentially a full-fledged scripting environment, with a focus on data-oriented operations. The various nodes you can drag-and-drop in are database connections, queries, transformations, file system operations, calls to stored procedures, and so on. It even lets you run .NET code inside of SSIS.Which is why Lisa was so surprised that her predecessor had a "call stored procedure" node called "move file". And more than that, she was surprised that the stored procedure looked like this:

There is fire sale on "Test In Production" incidents this week. (Ok, truth is that some of them are a little crusty and stale so we just mark them way down and push them all out at a loss).To be completely fair, testing in production is vitally important. If you didn't do that, the only way you'd know if something is broken is when one of your paying customers finds out. I call that testing in production the expensive way. The only WTFy thing about these is that when you test in production, your customers shouldn't stumble across the messes."We don't often test, but when we do it's always in production" snarked Brad W. unfairly."My phone gave its default alert noise mixed with... some sound that made it seem like the phone was damaged. This was the alert that appeared."

Carol sends us today's nasty bit of code. It does the thing you should never do: serializes by string munging.

Henrik spent too many hours, staring at the bug, trying to understand why the 3rd party service they were interacting with wasn't behaving the way he expected. Henrik would send updates, and then try and read back the results, and the changes didn't happen. Except sometimes they did. Reads would be inconsistent. It'd work fine for weeks, and then suddenly things would go off the rails, showing values that no one from Henrik's company had put in the database.The vendor said, "This is a problem on your side, clearly." Henrik disagreed.So Henrik went about talking over the problem with his fellow devs, working with the 3rd party support, and building test cases which could reproduce the results reliably. It took many weeks of effort, but by the end, he was confident he could prove it was the vendor's issue."Hey," Henrik said, "I think these tests pretty convincingly show that it's a problem on your side. Let me know if the tests highlight anything for you."The bug ticket vanished into the ether for many weeks. Eventually, the product owner replied. Their team had diagnosed the problem, and the root cause was that sometimes the API would get confused about record ownership and identity. It was a tricky problem to crack, but the product owner's developers had come up with a novel solution to resolve it:

Today, Mike sends us a Java Representative Line that is, well, very representative. The line itself isn't inherently a WTF, but it points to WTFs behind it. It's an omen of WTFs, a harbinger.

In the ancient times of the late 90s, Bert worked for a software solutions company. It was the kind of company that other companies hired to do software for them, releasing custom applications for each client. Well, "each" client implies more than one client, but in this company's case, they only had one reliable client.One day, the client said, "Hey, we have an application we built to handle scheduling helpdesk workers. Can you take a look at it and fix some problems we've got?" Bert's employer said, "Sure, no problem."Bert was handed an Excel file, loaded with VBA macros. In the first test, Bert tried to schedule 5 different workers for their shifts, only to find that resolving the schedule and generating output took an hour and a half. Turns out, "being too slow to use" was the main problem the client had.Digging in, Bert found code like this:

... or maybe I should have said both here and there?The Beast in Black has an equivocal fuel system."Apparently, the propane level in my storage tank just went quantum, and even the act of observing the level has not collapsed the superposition of more propane and less propane. I KNEW that the Copenhagen Interpretation couldn't be objectively correct."

Usually, when we have a "Tales from the Interview" we're focused on bad interviewing practices. Today, we're mixing up a "Tales" with a CodeSOD.Today's Anonymous submitter does tech screens at their company. Like most companies do, they give the candidate a simple toy problem, and ask them to solve it. The goal here is not to get the greatest code, but as our submitter puts it, "weed out the jokers".Now our submitter didn't tell us what the problem was, but I don't have to know what the problem was to understand that this is wrong:

Kleyguerth was having a hard time tracking down a bug. A _hasPicked flag was "magically" toggling itself to on. It was a bug introduced in a recent commit, but the commit in question was thousands of lines, and had the helpful comment "Fixed some stuff during the tests".In several places, the TypeScript code checks a property like so:

Calendars today may be controlled by a standards body, but that's hardly an inherent fact of timekeeping. Dates and times are arbitrary and we structure them to our convenience.If we rewind to ancient Rome, you had the role of Pontifex Maximus. This was the religious leader of Rome, and since honoring the correct feasts and festivals at the right time was part of the job, it was also the standards body which kept the calendar. It was, ostensibly, not a political position, but there was also no rule that an aspiring politician couldn't hold both that post and a political post, like consul. This was a loophole Julius Caesar ruthlessly exploited; if his political opposition wanted to have an important meeting on a given day, whoops! The signs and portents tell us that we need to have a festival and no work should be done!There's no evidence to prove it, but Julius Caesar is exactly the kind of petty that he probably skipped Pompey's birthday every year.Julius messed around with the calendar a fair bit for political advantage, but the final version of it was the Julian calendar and that was our core calendar for the next 1500 years or so (and in some places, still is the preferred calendar). At that point Pope Gregory came in, did a little refactoring and fixed the leap year calculations, and recalibrated the calendar to the seasons. The down side of that: he had to skip 13 days to get things back in sync.The point of this historical digression is that there really is no point in history when dates made sense. That still doesn't excuse today's Java code, sent to us by Bernard.

A ticket came in marked urgent. When users were entering data in the header field, the spaces they were putting in kept getting mangled. This was in production, and had been in production for sometime.Mike P picked up the ticket, and was able to track down the problem to a file called Strings.java. Yes, at some point, someone wrote a bunch of string helper functions and jammed them into a package. Of course, many of the functions were re-implementations of existing functions: reinvented wheels, now available in square.For example, the trim function.

AnAnonymous quality analyst and audiophile accounted"As a returning customer at napalmrecords.com I was forced to update my Billing Address. Fine. Sure.But what if my *House number* is a very big number? More than 10 "symbols"?Fortunately, 0xDEADBEEF for House number and J****** for First Name both passed validation."

Most languages these days have some variation of "is string null or empty" as a convenience function. Certainly, C#, the language we're looking at today does. Let's look at a few example of how this can go wrong, from different developers.We start with an example from Jason, which is useless, but not a true WTF:

We're going to start with the code, and then talk about it. You've seen it before, you know the chorus: bad date handling:

Chris's company has an unusual deployment. They had a MySQL database hosted on Cloud Provider A. They hired a web development company, which wanted to host their website on Cloud Provider B. Someone said, "Yeah, this makes sense," and wrote the web dev company a sizable check. They app was built, tested, and released, and everyone was happy.Everyone was happy until the first bills came in. They expected the data load for the entire month to be in the gigabytes range, based on their userbase and expected workloads. But for some reason, the data transfer was many terabytes, blowing up their operational budget for the year in a single month.Chris fired up a traffic monitor and saw that, yes, huge piles of data were getting shipped around with every request. Well, not every request. Every insert operation ended up retrieving a huge pile of data. A little more research was able to find the culprit:

Guy picked up a bug ticket. There was a Hiesenbug; sometimes, saving a new entry in the application resulted in a duplicate primary key error, which should never happen.The error was in the message-bus implementation someone else at the company had inner-platformed together, and it didn't take long to understand why it failed.

The Beast In Blackis back with a simple but silly factualerror on the part of the gateway to all (most)human knowledge.

Tobbi sends us a true confession: they wrote this code.The code we're about to look at is the kind of code that mixes JavaScript and PHP together, using PHP to generate JavaScript code. That's already a terrible anti-pattern, but Tobbi adds another layer to the whole thing.

Today's representative line is almost too short to be a full line. But I haven't got a category for representative characters, so we'll roll with it. First, though, we need the setup.Brody inherited a massive project for a government organization. It was the kind of code base that had thousands of lines per file, and frequently thousands of lines per function. Almost none of those lines were comments. Almost.In the middle of one of the shorter functions (closer to 500 lines), Brody found this:

The code Clemens M supported worked just fine for ages. And then one day, it broke. It didn't break after a deployment, which implied some other sort of bug. So Clemens dug in, playing the game of "what specific data rows are breaking the UI, and why?"One of the organizational elements of their system was the idea of "zones". I don't know the specifics of the application as a whole, but we can broadly describe it thus:The application oversaw the making of widgets. Widgets could be assigned to one or more zones. A finished product requires a set of widgets. Thus, the finished product has a number of zones that's the union of all of the zones of its component widgets.Which someone decided to handle this way:

Dates are messy things, full of complicated edge cases and surprising ways for our assumptions to fail. They lack the pure mathematical beauty of other data types, like integers. But that absence doesn't mean we can't apply the beautiful, concise, and simple tools of functional programming to handling dates.I mean, you or I could. J Banana's co-worker seems to struggle a bit with it.

"These results are incomprensible,"Brian wrote testily."The developers at SkillCertPro must use math derived from an entirely different universe than ours. I can boast a world record number of answered questions in one hour and fifteen minutes somewhere."

Today's Java snippet comes from Capybara James.The first sign something was wrong was this:

Henrik H sends us a short snippet, for a relative value of short.We've all seen this method before, but this is a particularly good version of it:

Chops was a developer for Initrode. Early on a Monday, they were summoned to their manager Gary's office before the caffeine had even hit their brain.Gary glowered up from his office chair as Chops entered. This wasn't looking good. "We need to talk about the latest commit for Taskmaster."Taskmaster was a large application that'd been around for decades, far longer than Chops had been an employee. Thousands of internal and external customers relied upon it. Refinements over time had led to remarkable stability, its typical uptime now measured in years. However, just last week, their local installation had unexpectedly suffered a significant crash. Chops had been assigned to troubleshooting and repair."What's wrong?" Chops asked."Your latest commit decreased the number of unit tests!" Gary replied as if Chops had slashed the tires on his BMW.Within Taskmaster, some objects that were periodically generated were given a unique ID from a pool. The pool was of limited size and required scanning to find a spare ID. Each time a value was needed, a search began where the last search ended. IDs returned to the pool as objects were destroyed would only be reused when the search wrapped back around to the start.Chops had discovered a bug in the wrap-around logic that would inevitably produce a crash if Taskmaster ran long enough. They also found that if the number of objects created exceeded the size of the pool, this would trigger an infinite loop.Rather than attempt to patch any of this, Chops had nuked the whole thing and replaced it with code that assigned each object a universally unique identifier (UUID) from a trusted library UUID generator within its constructor. Gone was the bad code, along with its associated unit tests.Knowing they would probably only get in a handful of words, Chops wonderered how on earth to explain all this in a way that would appease their manager. "Well-""That number must NEVER go down!" Gary snapped."But-""This is non-negotiable! Roll it back and come up with something better!"And so Chops had no choice but to remove their solution, put all the janky code back in place, and patch over it with kludge. Every comment left to future engineers contained a tone of apology.Taskmaster became less stable. Time and expensive developer hours were wasted. Risk to internal and external customers increased. But Gary could rest assured, knowing that his favored metric never faltered on his watch. [Advertisement] Keep all your packages and Docker containers in one place, scan for vulnerabilities, and control who can access different feeds. ProGet installs in minutes and has a powerful free version with a lot of great features that you can upgrade when ready.Learn more.

State machines are a powerful way to organize code. They are, after all, one of the fundamental models of computation. That's pretty good. A well designed state machine can make a complicated problem clear, and easy to understand.Chris, on the other hand, found this one.

In today's Error'd episode, we flirt with European English to acknowledge the GDPR.Modern Architect jeffphi shared an example of a hot software pattern from the early 21st."As a bonus, these pickleball events appear to come with pickleball event listeners, too!"

It's that time to take a look at a few short snippets.Boolean values can hold true or false. But is that truly self documenting? I think we need clearer variable names for this. Certainly, the snippet Nonymous found thinks so:

David G saw a pull request with a surprisingly long thread of comments on it. What was weirder was that the associated ticket was all about adding a single parameter to an existing method. What could be generating that much discussion?How could adding an argument add to an argument?

Ellis knew she needed a walk after she hurried off of Zoom at the end of the meeting to avoid sobbing in front of the group. She'd just been attending a free online seminar regarding safe job hunting on the Internet. Having been searching since the end of January, Ellis had already picked up plenty of first-hand experience with the modern job market, one rejection at a time. She thought she'd attend the seminar just to see if there were any additional things she wasn't aware of. The seminar had gone well, good information presented in a clear and engaging way. But by the end of it, Ellis was feeling bleak. Goodness gracious, she'd already been slogging through months of this. Hundreds of job applications with nothing to show for it. All of the scams out there, all of the bad actors preying on people desperate for their and their loved ones' survival!Ellis' childhood had been plagued with anxiety and depression. It was only as an adult that she'd learned any tricks for coping with them. These tricks had helped her avoid spiraling into full-on depression for the past several years. One such trick was to stop and notice whenever those first feelings hit. Recognize them, feel them, and then respond constructively.First, a walk. Going out where there were trees and sunshine: Ellis considered this "garbage collection" for her brain. So she stepped out the front door and started down a tree-lined path near her house, holding on to that bleak feeling. She was well aware that if she didn't address it, it would take root and grow into hopelessness, self-loathing, fear of the future. It would paralyze her, leave her curled up on the couch doing nothing. And it would all happen without any words issuing from her inner voice. That was the most insidious thing. It happened way down deep in a place where there were no words at all.Once she returned home, Ellis forced herself to sit down with a notebook and pencil and think very hard about what was bothering her. She wrote down each sentiment:This job search is a hopeless, unending slog!No one wants to hire me. There must be something wrong with me!This is the most brutal job search environment I've ever dealt with. There are new scams every day. Then add AI to every aspect until I want to vomit.This was the first step of a reframing technique she'd just read about in the book Right Kind of Wrong by Amy Edmonson. With the words out, it was possible to look at each statement and determine whether it was rational or irrational, constructive or harmful. Each statement could be replaced with something better.Ellis proceeded step by step through the list. Yes, this will end. Everything ends.There's nothing wrong with me. Most businesses are swamped with applications. There's a good chance mine aren't even being looked at before they're being auto-rejected. Remember the growth mindset you learned from Carol Dweck. Each application and interview is giving me experience and making me a better candidate.This job market is a novel context that changes every day. That means failure is not only inevitable, it's the only way forward.Ellis realized that her job hunt was very much like a search algorithm trying to find a path through a maze. When the algorithm encountered a dead end, did it deserve blame? Was it an occasion for shame, embarrassment, and despair? Of course not. Simply backtrack and keep going with the knowledge gained.Yes, there was truth to the fact that this was the toughest job market Ellis had ever experienced. Therefore, taking a note from Viktor Frankl, she spent a moment reimagining the struggle in a way that made it meaningful to her. Ellis began viewing her job hunt in this dangerous market, her gradual accumulation of survival information, as an act of resistance against it. She now hoped to write all about her experience once she was on the other side, in case her advice might help even one other person in her situation save time and frustration.While unemployed, she also had the opportunity to employ the search algorithm against entirely new mazes. Could Ellis expand her freelance writing into a sustainable gig, for instance? That would mean exploring all the different ways to be a freelance writer, something Ellis was now curious and excited to explore. [Advertisement] Keep all your packages and Docker containers in one place, scan for vulnerabilities, and control who can access different feeds. ProGet installs in minutes and has a powerful free version with a lot of great features that you can upgrade when ready.Learn more.

Gordon S.is smarter than the machines."I can only presume the "Fix Now with AI" button addssome mistakes in order to fix the lack of needed fixes."

Optional types are an attempt to patch the "billion dollar mistake". When you don't know if you have a value or not, you wrap it in an Optional, which ensures that there is a value (the Optional itself), thus avoiding null reference exceptions. Then you can query the Optional to see if there is a real value or not.This is all fine and good, and can cut down on some bugs. Good implementations are loaded with convenience methods which make it easy to work on the optionals.But then, you get code like Burgers found. Which just leaves us scratching our heads:

Matt was handed a pile of VB .Net code, and told, "This is yours now. I'm sorry."As often happens, previous company leadership said, "Why should I pay top dollar for experienced software engineers when I can hire three kids out of college for the same price?" The experiment ended poorly, and the result was a pile of bad VB code, which Matt now owned.Here's a little taste: