The Daily WTF

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:

Today's awfulness comes from Tim H, and while it's technically more than one line, it's so representative of the code, and so short that I'm going to call this a representative line. Before we get to the code, we need to talk a little history.Tim's project is roughly three decades old. It's a C++ tool used for a variety of research projects, and this means that 90% of the people who have worked on it are PhD candidates in computer science programs. We all know the rule of CompSci PhDs and programming: they're terrible at it. It's like the old joke about the farmer who, when unable to find an engineer to build him a cow conveyer, asked a physicist. After months of work, the physicist introduced the result: "First, we assume a perfectly spherical cow in a vacuum..."Now, this particularly function has been anonymized, but it's easy to understand what the intent was:

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. This is my story. Who am I? Just call me Anonymous.It starts at the top. A call came in from Lawrence Gibbs, the CEO himself, telling us that a conference room printer was, quote, "leaking." He didn't explain it, he just hung up. The boss ordered me out immediately, told me to step on it. I ignored the elevator, racing up the staircase floor after floor until I reached the dizzying summit of C-Town.There's less oxygen up there, I'm sure of it. My lungs ached and my head spun as I struggled to catch my breath. The fancy tile and high ceilings made a workaday schmuck like me feel daunted, unwelcome. All the same, I gathered myself and pushed on, if only to learn what on earth "leaking" meant in relation to a printer.I followed the signs on the wall to the specified conference room. In there, the thermostat had been kicked down into the negatives. The cold cut through every layer of mandated business attire, straight to bone. The scene was thick with milling bystanders who hugged themselves and traded the occasional nervous glance. Gibbs was nowhere to be found.Remembering my duty, I summoned my nerve. "Tech Support. Where's the printer?" I asked.Several pointing fingers showed me the way. The large printer/scanner was situated against the far wall, flanking an even more enormous conference table. Upon rounding the table, I was greeted with a grim sight: dozens of sheets of paper strewn about the floor like blood spatter. Everyone was keeping their distance; no one paid me any mind as I knelt to gather the pages. There were 30 in all. Each one was blank on one side, and sported some kind of large, blotchy ring on the other. Lord knew I drank enough java to recognize a coffee mug stain when I saw one, but these weren't actual stains. They were printouts of stains.The printer was plugged in. No sign of foul play. As I knelt there, unseen and unheeded, I clutched the ruined papers to my chest. Someone had wasted a tree and a good bit of toner, and for what? How'd it go down? Surely Gibbs knew more than he'd let on. The thought of seeking him out, demanding answers, set my heart to pounding. It was no good, I knew. He'd play coy all day and hand me my pink slip if I pushed too hard. As much as I wanted the truth, I had a stack of unpaid bills at home almost as thick as the one in my arms. I had to come up with something else.There had to be witnesses among the bystanders. I stood up and glanced among them, seeking out any who would return eye contact. There: a woman who looked every bit as polished as everyone else. But for once, I got the feeling that what lay beneath the facade wasn't rotten.With my eyes, I pleaded for answers.Not here, her gaze pleaded back.I was getting somewhere, I just had to arrange for some privacy. I hurried around the table again and weaved through bystanders toward the exit, hoping to beat it out of that icebox unnoticed. When I reached the threshold, I spotted Gibbs charging up the corridor, smoldering with entitlement. "Where the hell is Tech Support?!"I froze a good distance away from the oncoming executive, whose voice I recognized from a thousand corporate presentations. Instead of putting me to sleep this time, it jolted down my spine like lightning. I had to think fast, or I was gonna lose my lead, if not my life."I'm right here, sir!" I said. "Be right back! I, uh, just need to find a folder for these papers.""I've got one in my office."A woman's voice issued calmly only a few feet behind me. I spun around, and it was her, all right, her demeanor as cool as our surroundings. She nodded my way. "Follow me."My spirits soared. At that moment, I would've followed her into hell. Turning around, I had the pleasure of seeing Gibbs stop short with a glare of contempt. Then he waved us out of his sight.Once we were out in the corridor, she took the lead, guiding me through the halls as I marveled at my luck. Eventually, she used her key card on one of the massive oak doors, and in we went.You could've fit my entire apartment into that office. The place was spotless. Mini-fridge, espresso machine, even couches: none of it looked used. There were a couple of cardboard boxes piled up near her desk, which sat in front of a massive floor-to-ceiling window admitting ample sunlight.She motioned toward one of the couches, inviting me to sit. I shook my head in reply. I was dying for a cigarette by that point, but I didn't dare light up within this sanctuary. Not sure what to expect next, I played it cautious, hovering close to the exit. "Thanks for the help back there, ma'am.""Don't mention it." She walked back to her desk, opened up a drawer, and pulled out a brand-new manila folder. Then she returned to conversational distance and proffered it my way. "You're from Tech Support?"There was pure curiosity in her voice, no disparagement, which was encouraging. I accepted the folder and stuffed the ruined pages inside. "That's right, ma'am."She shook her head. "Please call me Leila. I started a few weeks ago. I'm the new head of HR."Human Resources. That acronym, which usually put me on edge, somehow failed to raise my hackles. I'd have to keep vigilant, of course, but so far she seemed surprisingly OK. "Welcome aboard, Leila. I wish we were meeting in better circumstances." Duty beckoned. I hefted the folder. "Printers don't just leak.""No." Leila glanced askance, grave."Tell me what you saw.""Well ..." She shrugged helplessly. "Whenever Mr. Gibbs gets excited during a meeting, he tends to lean against the printer and rest his coffee mug on top of it. Today, he must've hit the Scan button with his elbow. I saw the scanner go off. It was so bright ..." She trailed off with a pained glance downward."I know this is hard," I told her when the silence stretched too long. "Please, continue."Leila summoned her mettle. "After he leaned on the controls, those pages spilled out of the printer. And then ... then somehow, I have no idea, I swear! Somehow, all those pages were also emailed to me, Mr. Gibbs' assistant, and the entire board of directors!"The shock hit me first. My eyes went wide and my jaw fell. But then I reminded myself, I'd seen just as crazy and worse as the result of a cat jumping on a keyboard. A feline doesn't know any better. A top-level executive, on the other hand, should know better."Sounds to me like the printer's just fine," I spoke with conviction. "What we have here is a CEO who thinks it's OK to treat an expensive piece of office equipment like his own personal fainting couch.""It's terrible!" Leila's gaze burned with purpose. "I promise, I'll do everything I possibly can to make sure something like this never happens again!"I smiled a gallows smile. "Not sure what anyone can do to fix this joint, but the offer's appreciated. Thanks again for your help."Now that I'd seen this glimpse of better things, I selfishly wanted to linger. But it was high time I got outta there. I didn't wanna make her late for some meeting or waste her time. I backed up toward the door on feet that were reluctant to move.Leila watched me with a look of concern. "Mr. Gibbs was the one who called Tech Support. I can't close your ticket for you; you'll have to get him to do it. What are you going to do?"She cared. That made leaving even harder. "I dunno yet. I'll think of something."I turned around, opened the massive door, and put myself on the other side of it in a hurry, using wall signs to backtrack to the conference room. Would our paths ever cross again? Unlikely. Someone like her was sure to get fired, or quit out of frustration, or get corrupted over time.It was too painful to think about, so I forced myself to focus on the folder of wasted pages in my arms instead. It felt like a mile-long rap sheet. I was dealing with an alleged leader who went so far as to blame the material world around him rather than accept personal responsibility. I'd have to appeal to one or more of the things he actually cared about: himself, his bottom line, his sense of power.By the time I returned to the conference room to face the CEO, I knew what to tell him. "You're right, sir, there's something very wrong with this printer. We're gonna take it out here and give it a thorough work-up."That was how I was able to get the printer out of that conference room for good. Once it underwent "inspection" and "testing," it received a new home in a previously unused closet. Whenever Gibbs got to jawing in future meetings, all he could do was lean against the wall. Ticket closed.Gibbs remained at the top, doing accursed things that trickled down to the roots of his accursed company. But at least from then on, every onboarding slideshow included a photo of one of the coffee ring printouts, with the title Respect the Equipment.Thanks, Leila. I can live with that.[Advertisement] Picking up NuGet is easy. Getting good at it takes time. Download our guide to learn the best practice of NuGet for the Enterprise.

"What word can spell with the letters housucops?" asksMark R."Sometimes AI hallucinations can be hard to find. Other times, they just kind of stand out..."

Once upon a time, when the Web was young, if you wanted to be a cool kid, you absolutely needed two things on your website: a guestbook for people to sign, and a hit counter showing how many people had visited your Geocities page hosting your Star Trek fan fiction.These days, we don't see them as often, but companies still like to track the information, especially when it comes to counting downloads. So when Justin started on a new team and saw a download count in their analytics, he didn't think much of it at all. Nor did he think much about it when he saw the download count displayed on the download page.Another thing that Justin didn't think much about was big piles of commits getting merged in overnight, at least not at first. But each morning, Justin needed to pull in a long litany of changes from a user named "MrStinky". For the first few weeks, Justin was too preoccupied with getting his feet under him, so he didn't think about it too much.But eventually, he couldn't ignore what he saw in the git logs.

Jessica recently started at a company still using Windows Forms.Well, that was a short article. Oh, you want more WTF than that? Sure, we can do that.As you might imagine, a company that's still using Windows Forms isn't going to upgrade any time soon; they've been using an API that's been in maintenance mode for a decade, clearly they're happy with it.But they're not too happy- Jessica was asked to track down a badly performing report. This of course meant wading through a thicket of spaghetti code, pointless singletons, and the general sloppiness that is the code base. Some of the code was written using Entity Framework for database access, much of it is not.While it wasn't the report that Jessica was sent to debug, this method caught her eye:

In theory, HTTP status codes should be easy to work with. In the 100s? You're doing some weird stuff and breaking up large requests into multiple sub-requests. 200s? It's all good. 300s? Look over there. 400s? What the hell are you trying to do? 500s? What the hell is the server trying to do?This doesn't mean people don't endlessly find ways to make it hard. LinkedIn, for example, apparently likes to send 999s if you try and view a page without being logged in. Shopify has invented a few. Apache has added a 218 "This is Fine". And then there's WebDAV, which not only adds new status codes, but adds a whole bunch of new verbs to HTTP requests.Francesco D sends us a "clever" attempt at handling status codes.

For months, everything at Yusuf's company was fine. Then, suddenly, he comes in to the office to learn that overnight the log exploded with thousands of panic messages. No software changes had been pushed, no major configurations had happened- just a reboot. What had gone wrong?This particular function was invoked as part of the application startup:

low-case jeffphi found "Yep, all kinds of technical errors."

Andreas found this in a rather large, rather ugly production code base.

Ronan works with a vibe coder- an LLM addicted developer. This is a type of developer that's showing up with increasing frequency. Their common features include: not reading the code the AI generated, not testing the code the AI generated, not understanding the context of the code or how it integrates into the broader program, and absolutely not bothering to follow the company coding standards.Here's an example of the kind of Python code they were "writing":

JavaScript is frequently surprising in terms of what functions it does not support. For example, while it has a Math.round function, that only rounds to the nearest integer, not an arbitrary precision. That's no big deal, of course, as if you wanted to round to, say, four decimal places, you could write something like: Math.floor(n * 10000) / 10000.But in the absence of a built-in function to handle that means that many developers choose to reinvent the wheel. Ryan found this one.

We've discussed singleton abuse as an antipattern many times on this site, but folks keep trying to find new ways to implement them badly. And Olivia's co-worker certainly found one.We start with a C++ utility class with a bunch of functions in it:

It is said (allegedly by the Scots) that confession heals the soul.But does it need to be strictly voluntary? The folks toiling away overat CodeSOD conscientiously change the names to protect the innocentbut this side of the house is committed to curing the tortured souls of webdevs. Whetherthey like it or not. Sadly Sam's submission has been blinded, so theblack black soul of xxxxxxxxxxte.com remains unfortunately undesmirched,but three others should be experiencing the sweet sweet healing lightof day right about now. I sure hope they appreciate it.More monkey business this week from Reinier B. who is hoping to check in on some distant cousins."I'll make sure to accept email from {email address},otherwise I won't be able to visit {zoo name}."

"Code should be clear and explain what it does, comments should explain why it does that." This aphorism is a decent enough guideline, though like any guidance short enough to fit on a bumper sticker, it can easily be overapplied or misapplied.Today, we're going to look at a comment Salagir wrote. This comment does explain what the code does, can't hope to explain why, and instead serves as a cautionary tale. We're going to take the comment in sections, because it's that long.This is about a stored procedure in MariaDB. Think of Salagir as our Virgil, a guide showing us around the circles of hell. The first circle? A warning that the dead code will remain in the code base:

While I frequently have complaints about over-reliance on Object Relational Mapping tools, they do offer key benefits. For example, mapping each relation in the database to a type in your programming language at least guarantees a bit of type safety in your code. Or, you could be like Nick L's predecessor, and write VB code like this.

Michael has the "fun" task of converting old, mainframe-driven reports into something more modern. This means reading through reams of Intelligent Query code.Like most of these projects, no one has a precise functional definition of what it's supposed to do. The goal is to replace the system with one that behaves exactly the same, but is more "modern". This means their test cases are "run the two systems in parallel and compare the outputs; if they match, the upgrade is good."After converting one report, the results did not match. Michael dug in, tracing through the code. The name of the report contained the word "Annual". One of the key variables which drove original the report was named TODAYS-365 (yes, you can put dashes in variables in IQ). Michael verified that the upgraded report was pulling exactly one year's worth of data. Tracing through the original report, Michael found this:

User inputs are frequently incorrect, which is why we validate them. So, for example, if the user is allowed to enter an "asset ID" to perform some operation on it, we should verify that the asset ID exists before actually doing the operation.Someone working with Capybara James almost got there. Almost.

If monkeys aren't your bag,Manuel H. is down to clown."If anyone wants to know the address of that circus - it's written right there.Too bad that it's only useful if you happen to be in the same local subnet..."Or on the same block.

In my career, several times I've ended up being the pet programmer for a team of engineers and CNC operators, which frequently meant helping them do automation in their CAD tools. At its peak complexity, it resulted in a (mostly unsuccessful) attempt to build a lens/optics simulator in RhinoCAD.Which brings us to the code Nick L sends us. It sounds like Nick's in a similar position: engineers write VB.Net code to control their CAD tool, and then Nick tries desperately to get them to follow some sort of decent coding practice. The result is code like:

Carlos G found some C++ that caused him psychic harm, and wanted to know how it ended up that way. So he combed through the history. Let's retrace the path with him.Here was the original code:

To ensure that several services could only be invoked by trusted parties, someone at Ricardo P's employer had the brilliant idea of requiring a token along with each request. Before servicing a request, they added this check:

The Standard Template Library for C++ is... interesting. A generic set of data structures and algorithms was a pretty potent idea. In practice, early implementations left a lot to be desired. Because the STL is a core part of C++ at this point, and widely used, it also means that it's slow to change, and each change needs to go through a long approval process.Which is why the STL didn't have a std::map::containsfunction until the C++20 standard. There were other options. For example, one could usestd::map::count, to count how many times a key appear. Or you could use std::map::findto search for a key. One argument against adding astd::map::containsfunction is thatstd::map::count basically does the same job and has the same performance.None of this stopped people from adding their own. Which brings us to Gaetan's submission. Absent a std::map::contains method, someone wrote a whole slew of fieldExists methods, where field is one of many possible keys they might expect in the map.

Or cold. It's getting hot and cold. But on average... no. It's absolutely unbelievable."There's been a physics breakthrough!"Mate exclaimed. "Looking at meteoblue,I should probably reconsider that hike on Monday." Yes, you should blow it off, but you won't need to.

Mads introduces today's code sample with this line: " this was before they used git to track changes".Note, this is not to say that they were using SVN, or Mercurial, or even Visual Source Safe. They were not using anything. How do I know?

I am on record as not particularly loving JSON as a serialization format. It's fine, and I'm certainly not going to die on any hills over it, but I think that as we stripped down the complexity of XML we threw away too much.On the flip side, the simplicity means that it's harder to use it wrong. It's absent many footguns.Well, one might think. But then Hootentoot ran into a problem. You see, an internal partner needed to send them a JSON document which contains a JSON document. Now, one might say, "isn't any JSON object a valid sub-document? Can't you just nest JSON inside of JSON all day? What could go wrong here?"

"This keeps giving me a primary key violation!" complained one of Nancy's co-workers. "Screw it, I'm dropping the primary key constraint!"That was a terrifying thing to hear someone say out loud. Nancy decided to take a look at the table before anyone did anything they'd regret.

Adam's organization was going through a period of rapid growth. Part of this growth was spinning up new backend services to support new functionality. The growth would have been extremely fast, except for one thing applying back pressure: for some reason, spinning up a new service meant recompiling and redeploying all the other services.Adam didn't understand why, but it seemed like an obvious place to start poking at something for improvement. All of the services depended on a library called "ServiceLib"- though not all of them actually used the library. The library was a set of utilities for administering, detecting, and interacting with services in their environment- essentially a homegrown fabric/bus architecture.It didn't take long, looking at the source control history, to understand why there was a rebuild after the release of every service. Each service triggered a one line change in this:

Michael R. is back with receipts."I have been going to Tayyabs for >20 years. In the past they only accepted cash tips. Good to see they are testing a new way now."

Misha has a co-worker who has unusual ideas about how database performance works. This co-worker, Ted, has a vague understanding that a SQL query optimizer will attempt to find the best execution path for a given query. Unfortunately, Ted has just enough knowledge to be dangerous; he believes that the job of a developer is to write SQL queries that will "trick" the optimizer into doing an even better job, somehow.This means that Ted loves subqueries.For example, let's say you had a table called tbl_updater, which is used to store pending changes for a batch operation that will later get applied. Each change in updater has a unique change key that identifies it. For reasons best not looked into too deeply, at some point in the lifecycle of a record in this table, the application needs to null out several key fields based on the change value.If you or I were writing this, we might do something like this:

Carlos and Claire found themselves supporting a 3rd party logistics package, called IniFreight. Like most "enterprise" software, it was expensive, unreliable, and incredibly complicated. It had also been owned by four different companies during the time Carlos had supported it, as its various owners underwent a series of acquisitions. It kept them busy, which is better than being bored.One day, Claire asked Carlos, "In SQL, what does an exclamation point mean?""Like, as a negation? I don't think most SQL dialects support that.""No, like-" and Claire showed him the query.

Alistair sends us a pretty big blob of code, but it's a blob which touches upon everyone's favorite design pattern: the singleton. It's a lot of Java code, so we're going to take this as chunks. Let's start with the two methods responsible for constructing the object.The purpose of this code is to parse an XML file, and construct a mapping from a "name" field in the XML to a "batch descriptor".

James's team has a pretty complicated deployment process implemented as a series of bash scripts. The deployment is complicated, the scripts doing the deployment are complicated, and failures mid-deployment are common. That means they need to gracefully roll back, and they way they do that is by making backup copies of the modified files.This is how they do that.

"Toledo is on Earth, Adrian must be on Venus," remarksRussell M., explaining"This one's from weather.gov. Note that Adrian is 28 million miles away from Toledo. Being raised in Toledo, Michigan did feel like another world sometimes, but this is something else." Even Toledo itself is a good bit distant from Toledo. Definitely a long walk.

Once upon a time, there was a bank whose business relied on a mainframe. As the decades passed and the 21st century dawned, the bank's bigwigs realized they had to upgrade their frontline systems to applications built in Java and .NET, but-for myriad reasons that boiled down to cost, fear, and stubbornness-they didn't want to migrate away from the mainframe entirely. They also didn't want the new frontline systems to talk directly to the mainframe or vice-versa. So they tasked old-timer Edgar with writing some middleware. Edgar's brainchild was a Windows service that took care of receiving frontline requests, passing them to the mainframe, and sending the responses back.Edgar's middleware worked well, so well that it was largely forgotten about. It outlasted Edgar himself, who, after another solid decade of service, moved on to another company.A few years later, our submitter John F. joined the bank's C# team. By this point, the poor middleware seemed to be showing its age. A strange problem had arisen: between 8:00AM and 5:00PM, every 45 minutes or so, it would lock up and have to be restarted. Outside of those hours, there was no issue. The problem was mitigated by automatic restarts, but it continued to inflict pain and aggravation upon internal users and external customers. A true solution had to be found.Unfortunately, Edgar was long gone. The new "owner" of the middleware was an infrastructure team containing zero developers. Had Edgar left them any documentation? No. Source code? Sort of. Edgar had given a copy of the code to his friend Bob prior to leaving. Unfortunately, Bob's copy was a few point releases behind the version of middleware running in production. It was also in C, and there were no C developers to be found anywhere in the company.And so, the bank's bigwigs cobbled together a diverse team of experts. There were operating system people, network people, and software people ... including the new guy, John. Poor John had the unenviable task of sifting through Edgar's source code. Just as the C# key sits right next to the C key on a piano, reasoned the bigwigs, C# couldn't be that different from C.John toiled in an unfamiliar language with no build server or test environment to aid him. It should be no great surprise that he got nowhere. A senior coworker suggested that he check what Windows' Process Monitor registered when the middleware was running. John allowed a full day to pass, then looked at the results: it was now clear that the middleware was constantly creating and destroying threads. John wrote a Python script to analyze the threads, and found that most of them lived for only seconds. However, every 5 minutes, a thread was created but never destroyed.This only happened during the hours of 8:00AM to 5:00PM.At the next cross-functional team meeting behind closed doors, John finally had something of substance to report to the large group seated around the conference room table. There was still a huge mystery to solve: where were these middleware-killing threads coming from?"Wait a minute! Wasn't Frank doing something like that?" one of the other team members piped up."Frank!" A department manager with no technical expertise, who insisted on attending every meeting regardless, darted up straight in his chair. For once, he wasn't haranguing them for their lack of progress. He resembled a wolf who'd sniffed blood in the air. "You mean Frank from Accounting?!"This was the corporate equivalent of an arrest warrant. Frank from Accounting was duly called forth."That's my program." Frank stood before the table, laid back and blithe despite the obvious frayed nerves of several individuals within the room. "It queries the middleware every 5 minutes."They were finally getting somewhere. Galvanized, John's heart pounded. "How?" he asked."Well, it could be that the middleware is down, so first, my program opens a connection just to make sure it's working," Frank explained. "If that works, it opens another connection and sends the query."John's confusion mirrored the multiple frowns that filled the room. He forced himself to carefully parse what he'd just heard. "What happens to the first connection?""What do you mean?" Frank asked."You said your program opens two connections. What do you do with the first one?""Oh! I just use that one to test whether the middleware is up.""You don't need to do that!" one of the networking experts snarled. "For Pete's sake, take that out of your code! Don't you realize you're tanking this thing for everyone else?"Frank's expression made clear that he was entirely oblivious to the chaos wrought by his program. Somehow, he survived the collective venting of frustration that followed within that conference room. After one small update to Frank's program, the middleware stabilized-for the time being. And while Frank became a scapegoat and villain to some, he was a hero to many, many more. After all, he single-handedly convinced the bank's bigwigs that the status quo was too precarious. They began to plan out a full migration away from mainframe, a move that would free them from their dependence upon aging, orphaned middleware.Now that the mystery had been solved, John knew where to look in Edgar's source code. The thread pool had a limit of 10, and every thread began by waiting for input. The middleware could handle bad input well enough, but it hadn't been written to handle the case of no input at all. [Advertisement] Utilize BuildMaster to release your software with confidence, at the pace your business demands. Download today!

One of the endless struggles in writing reusable API endpoints is creating useful schemas to describe them. Each new serialization format comes up with new ways to express your constraints, each with their own quirks and footguns and absolute trainwrecks.Maarten has the "pleasure" of consuming an XML-based API, provided by a third party. It comes with an XML schema, for validation. Now, the XML Schema Language has a large number of validators built in. For example, if you want to restrict a field to being a date, you can mark it's type as xsd:date. This will enforce a YYYY-MM-DD format on the data.If you want to ruin that validation, you can do what the vendor did:

Carolyn inherited a somewhat old project that had been initiated by a "rockstar" developer, and then passed to developer after developer over the years. They burned through rockstars faster than Spinal Tap goes through drummers. The result is gems like this:

Dan was using a third-party database which provided a PHP API. At one point, Dan was running into an issue where he actually needed locks on the database. Fortunately for him, the vendor documentation told him that there was a method called obtainRowLock.

Happy Friday. For those of us in America, today is a political holiday. But let's avoid politics for the moment. Here's a few more wtfs."Error messages are hard," sums Ben Holzman, mock-replying"Your new puzzle games are fun, LinkedIn, but your error messages need a little work..."

Sometimes, you see some code which is perfectly harmless, but illustrates an incredibly dangerous person behind them. The code isn't good, but it isn't bad in any meaningful way, but it was written by a cocaine addled Pomeranian behind the controls of a bulldozer: it's full of energy, doesn't know exactly what's going on, and at some point, it's going to hit something important.Such is the code which Roman sends us.

It's not unusual to store format templates in your application configuration files. I'd argue it's probably a good and wise thing to do. But Phillip inherited a C# application from a developer who "abandoned" it, and there were some choices in there.

Aaron was debugging some C# code, and while this wasn't the source of the bug, it annoyed him enough to send it to us.

In ancient times, Rob's employer didn't have its own computer; it rented time on a mid-range computer and ran all its jobs using batch processing in COBOL. And in those ancient times, these stone tools were just fine.But computing got more and more important, and the costs for renting time kept going up and up, so they eventually bought their own AS/400. And that meant someone needed to migrate all of their COBOL to RPG. And management knew what you do for those kinds of conversions: higher a Highly Paid Consultant.On one hand, the results weren't great. On the other, the code is still in use, though has been through many updates and modernizations and migrations in that time. Still, the HPC's effects can be felt, like this block, which hasn't been touched since she was last here: