In .NET, if you want to get the first item from an IList object, you could just use the index: list[0]. You also have a handy-dandy function called First, or even better FirstOrDefault. FirstOrDefault helpfully doesn’t throw an exception if the list is empty (though depending on what’s in the list, it may give you a null).What I’m saying is that there are plenty of easy, and obvious ways to get the first element of a list.Stevie’s co-worker did this instead:
The holidays are a time of traditions, but traditions do change. For example, classic holiday specials have gone from getting cut down for commercials, to getting snapped up by streaming services. Well, perhaps it's time for a new holiday tradition. A holiday tradition which includes a minor dose of… WTF.We're happy to announce our "Worse Than Failure Holiday Special" Contest. This is your chance to submit your own take on a very special holiday story. Not only is it your chance to get your place in history secured for all eternity, but also win some valuable prizes.What We WantWe want your best holiday story. Any holiday is valid, though given the time of year, we're expecting one of the many solstice-adjacent holidays. This story can be based on real experiences, or it can be entirely fictional, because what we really want is a new holiday tradition.The best submissions will:
When it comes to backwards compatibility, Microsoft is one of those vendors that really commits to it. It’s not that they won’t make breaking changes once in awhile, but they recognize that they need to be cautious about it, and give customers a long window to transition.This was true back when Microsoft made it clear that .NET was the future, and that COM was going away. To make the transition easier, they created a COM Interop system which let COM code call .NET code, and vice versa. The idea was that you would never need to rewrite everything from scratch, you could just transition module by module until all the COM code was gone and just .NET remained. This also meant you could freely mix Visual Basic and Visual Basic.Net, which never caused any problems.Well Moritz sends us some .NET code that gets called by COM code, and presents us with the rare case where we probably should just rewrite everything from scratch.
One of the lines between code that's "not great, but like, it's fine, I guess" and "wow, WTF" is confidence.For example, Francis Gauthier inherited a WinForms application. One of the form fields in this application was a text box that held a number, and the developers wanted to always display whatever the user entered without leading zeroes.Now, WinForms is pretty simplistic as UI controls go, so there isn't really a great "oh yes, do this!" solution to solving that simple problem. A mix of using MVC-style patterns with a formatter between the model and the UI would be "right", but might be more setup than the problem truly calls for.Which is why, at first blush, without more context, I'd be more apt to put this bad code into the "not great, but whatever" category:
Cloud management consoles are, in most cases, targeted towards enterprise customers. This runs into Remy’s Law of Enterprise Software: if a piece of software is in any way described as being “enterprise”, it’s a piece of garbage.Richard was recently poking around on one of those cloud provider’s sites. The software experience was about as luxurious as one expects, which is to say it was a pile of cryptically named buttons for the 57,000 various kinds of preconfigured services this particular service had on offer.At the bottom of each page, there was a small video thumbnail, linking back to a YouTube video, presumably to provide marketing information, or support guidance for whatever the user was trying to do.This was the code which generated them (whitespace added for readability):
TypeScript offers certain advantages over JavaScript. Compile time type-checking can catch a lot of errors, it can move faster than browsers, so it offers the latest standards (and the compiler handles the nasty details of shimming them into browsers), plus it has a layer of convenient, syntactic sugar.If you’re using TypeScript, you can use the compiler to find all sorts of ugly problems with your code, and all you need to do is turn the right flags on.Or, you can be like Quintus’s co-worker, who checked in this… thing.
Understanding the Gang of Four design patterns is a valuable bit of knowledge for a programmer. Of course, instead of understanding them, it sometimes seems like most design pattern fans just… use them. Sometimes- often- overuse them. The Java Spring Framework infamously has classes with names like SimpleBeanFactoryAwareAspectInstanceFactory. Whether that's a proper use of patterns and naming conventions is a choice I leave to the reader, but boy do I hate looking at it.The GoF patterns break down into four major categories: Behavioral, Structural, Concurrency, and Creational patterns. The Creational category, as the name implies, is all about code which can be used to create instances of objects, like that Factory class above. It is a useful collection of patterns for writing reusable, testable, and modular code. Most Dependency Injection/Inversion of Control frameworks are really just applied creational patterns.It also means that some people decide that "directly invoking constructors is considered harmful". And that's why Emiko found this Java code:
If we presume there is a Hell for IT folks, we can only assume the eternal torment involves configuring or interfacing with printers. Perhaps Anabel K is already in Hell, because that describes her job.Anabel's company sells point-of-sale tools, including receipt printers. Their customers are not technical, so a third-party installer handles configuring those printers in the field. To make the process easy and repeatable, Anabel maintains an app which automates the configuration process for the third party.The basic flow is like this:The printer gets shipped to the installer. At their facility, someone from the installer opens the box, connects the printer to power, and then to the network. They then run the app Anabel maintains, which connects to the printer's on-board web server and POSTs a few form-data requests. Assuming everything works, the app reports success. The printer goes back in the box and is ready to get installed at the client site at some point in the near future.The whole flow was relatively painless until the printer manufacturer made a firmware change. Instead of the username/password being admin/admin, it was now admin/serial-number. No one was interested in having the installer techs key in the long serial number, but digging around in the documentation, Anabel found a simple fix.In addition to the on-board web-server, there was also a TCP port running. If you connected to the port and sent the correct command, it would reply with the serial number.Anabel made the appropriate changes. Now, her app would try and authenticate as admin/admin, and if it failed, it'd open a TCP connection, query the serial number, and then try again. Anabel grabbed a small pile of printers from storage, a mix of old and new firmware, loaded them up with receipt paper, and ran the full test suite to make sure everything still worked.Within minutes, they were all happily churning out test prints. Anabel released her changes to production, and off it went to the installer technicians.A few weeks later, the techs call in through support, in an absolute panic. "The configuration app has stopped working. It doesn't work on any of the printers we received in the past few weeks."There was a limited supply of the old version of printers, and dozens got shipped out every day. If this didn't get fixed ASAP, they would very quickly find themselves with a pile of printers the installers couldn't configure. Management got on conference calls, roped Anabel in on the middle of long email chains, and they all agreed: there must be something wrong with Anabel's changes.It wasn't unreasonable to suspect, but Anabel had tested it thoroughly. Heck, she had a few of the new printers on her desk and couldn't replicate the failure. So she got on a call with a tech and started from square one. Is it plugged in. Is it plugged into the network. Are there any restrictions on the network, or on the machine running the app, that might prevent access to non-standard ports?Over the next few days, while the stock of old printers kept dwindling, this escalated up to sending a router with a known configuration out to the technicians. It was just to ensure that there were no hidden firewalls or network policies preventing access to the TCP port. Even still, on its own dedicated network, nothing worked."Okay, let's double check the printer's network config," Anabel said on the call. "When it boots up, it should print out its network config- IP, subnet, gateway, DHCP config, all of that. What does that say?"The tech replied, "Oh. We don't have paper in it. One sec." While rooting around in the box, they added, "We don't normally bother. It's just one more thing to unbox before putting it right back in the box."The printer booted up, faithfully printed out its network config, which was what everyone expected. "Okay, I guess… try running the tool again?" Anabel suggested.And it worked.Anabel turned to one of the test printers she had been using, and pulled out the roll of receipt paper. She ran the configuration tool… and it failed.The TCP service only worked when there was paper in the printer. Anabel reported it as a bug to the printer vendor, but if and when that gets fixed is anyone's guess. The techs didn't want to have to fully unbox the printers, including the paper, for every install, but that was an easy fix: with each shipment of printers Anabel's company just started shipping a few packs of receipt paper for the techs. They can just crack one open and use it to configure a bunch of printers before it runs out. [Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!
It’s generally hard to do worse than a SQL injection vulnerability. Data access is fundamental to pretty much every application, and every programming environment has some set of rich tools that make it easy to write powerful, flexible queries without leaving yourself open to SQL injection attacks.And yet, and yet, they’re practically a standard feature of bad code. I suppose that’s what makes it bad code.Gidget W inherited a PHP application which, unsurprisingly, is rife with SQL injection vulnerabilities. But, unusually, it doesn’t leverage string concatenation to get there. Gidget’s predecessor threw a little twist on it.
About three years ago, Consuela inherited a giant .NET project. It was… not good. To communicate how “not good” it was, Consuela had a lot of possible submissions. Sending the worst code might be the obvious choice, but it wouldn’t give a good sense of just how bad the whole thing was, so they opted instead to find something that could roughly be called the “median” quality.This is a stored procedure that is roughly about the median sample of the overall code. Half of it is better, but half of it gets much, much worse.
The C# "extension method" feature lets you implement static methods which "magically" act like they're instance methods. It's a neat feature which the .NET Framework uses extensively. It's also a great way to implement some convenience functions.Brandt found some "convenience" functions which were exploiting this feature.
One of my favorite illusions is the progress bar. Even the worst, most inaccurate progress bar will make an application feel faster. The simple feedback which promises "something is happening" alters the users' sense of time.So, let's say you're implementing a JavaScript progress bar. You need to decide if you are "in progress" or not. So you need to check: if there is a progress value, and the progress value is less than 100, you're still in progress.Mehdi's co-worker decided to implement that check as… the opposite.
Mapping between types can create some interesting challenges. Michal has one of those scenarios. The code comes to us heavily anonymized, but let’s see what we can do to understand the problem and the solution.There is a type called ItemA. ItemA is a model object on one side of a boundary, and the consuming code doesn’t get to touch ItemA objects directly, it instead consumes one of two different types: ItemB, or SimpleItemB.The key difference between ItemB and SimpleItemB is that they have different validation rules. It’s entirely possible that an instance of ItemA may be a valid SimpleItemB and an invalid ItemB. If an ItemA contains exactly five required fields importantDataPieces, and everything else is null, it should turn into a SimpleItemB. Otherwise, it should turn into an ItemB.Michal adds: “Also noteworthy is the fact that ItemA is a class generated from XML schemas.”The Java class was generated, but not the conversion method.
Janell found herself on a project where most of her team were offshore developers she only interacted with via email, and a tech lead who had not ever programmed on the .NET Framework, but did some VB6 “back in the day”, and thus “knew VB”.The team dynamic rapidly became a scenario where the tech lead issued an edict, the offshore team blindly applied it, and then Janell was left staring at the code wondering how to move forward with this.These decrees weren’t all bad. For example: “Avoid repeated code by re-factoring into methods,” isn’t the worst advice. It’s not complete advice- there’s a lot of gotchas in that- but it fits on a bumper-sticker and generally leads to better code.There were other rules that… well:
After years spent supporting an enterprisey desktop application with a huge codebase full of WTFs, Sammy thought he had seen all there was to be seen. He was about to find out how endlessly deep the bottom of the WTF barrel truly was.During development, Sammy frequently had to restart said application: a surprisingly onerous process, as it took about 30 seconds each and every time to return to a usable state. Eventually, a mix of curiosity and annoyance spurred him into examining just why it took so long to start.He began by profiling the performance. When the application first initialized, it performed 10 seconds of heavy processing. Then the CPU load dropped to 0% for a full 16 seconds. After that, it increased, pegging out one of the eight cores on Sammy's machine for 4 seconds. Finally, the application was ready to accept user input. Sammy knew that, for at least some of the time, the application was calling out to and waiting for a response from a server. That angle would have to be investigated as well.Further digging and hair-pulling led Sammy to a buried bit of code, a Very Old Mechanism for configuring the visibility of items on the main menu. While some menu items were hard-coded, others were dynamically added by extension modules. The application administrator had the ability to hide or show any of them by switching checkboxes in a separate window.When the application first started up, it retrieved the user's latest configuration from the server, applied it to their main menu, then sent the resulting configuration back to the server. The server, in turn, called DELETE * FROM MENU_CFG; INSERT INTO MENU_CFG (…); INSERT INTO MENU_CFG (…); …Sammy didn't know what was the worst thing about all this. Was it the fact that the call to the server was performed synchronously for no reason? Or, that after multiple DELETE / INSERT cycles, the table of a mere 400 rows weighed more than 16 MB? When the users all came in to work at 9:00 AM and started up the application at roughly the same time, their concurrent transactions caused quite the bottleneck—and none of it was necessary. The Very Old Mechanism had been replaced with role-based configuration years earlier.All Sammy could do was write up a change request to put in JIRA. Speaking of bottlenecks ... [Advertisement] ProGet’s got you covered with security and access controls on your NuGet feeds. Learn more.
Date representations are one of those long-term problems for programmers, which all ties into the problem that "dates are hard". Nowadays, we have all these fancy date-time types that worry about things like time zones and leap years, and all of that stuff for us. Pretty much everything, at some level, relies on the Unix Epoch. But there is a time before that was the standard.In the mainframe era, not all the numeric representations worked the same way that we're used to, and it was common to simply define the number of digits you wanted to store. So, if you wanted to store a date, you could define an 8-digit field, and store the date as 20201012: October 10th, 2020.This is a pretty great date format, for that era. Relatively compact (and yes, the whole Y2K thing means that you might have defined that as a six digit field), inherently sortable, and it's not too bad to slice it back up into date parts, when you need it. And like anything else which was a good idea a long time ago, you still see it lurking around today. Which does become a problem when you inherit code written by people who didn't understand why things worked that way.Virginia N inherited some C# code which meets that criteria. And the awkward date handling isn't even the WTF. There's a lot to unpack in this particular sample, so let's start with… the unpack function.
Content management systems are… an interesting domain in software development. On one hand, they’re one of the most basic types of CRUD applications, at least at their core. On the other, it’s the sort of problem domain where you can get 90% of what you need really easily, but the remaining 10% are the cases that are going to make you pull your hair out.Which is why pretty much every large CMS project supports some kind of plugin architecture, and usually some sort of marketplace to curate those plugins. That kind of curation is hard, writing plugins tends to be more about “getting the feature I need” and less about “releasing a reliable product”, and thus the available plugins for most CMSes tend to be of wildly varying quality.Paul recently installed a plugin for Joomla, and started receiving this error:
At an old job, I did a significant amount of VB.Net work. I didn’t hate VB.Net. Sure, the syntax was clunky, but autocomplete mostly solved that, and it was more OR
In a global health crisis, like say, a pandemic, accurate and complete data about its spread is a "must have". Which is why, in the UK, there's a great deal of head-scratching over how the government "lost" thousands of cases.Oops.Normally, we don't dig too deeply into current events on this site, but the circumstances here are too "WTF" to allow them to pass without comment.From the BBC, we know that this system was used to notify individuals if they have tested positive for COVID-19, and notify their close contacts that they have been exposed. That last bit is important. Disease spread can quickly turn exponential, and even though COVID-19 has a low probability of causing fatalities, the law of large numbers means that a lot of people will die anyway on that exponential curve. If you can track exposure, get exposed individuals tested and isolated before they spread the disease, you can significantly cut down its spread.People are rightfully pretty upset about this mistake. Fortunately, the BBC has a followup article discussing the investigation, where an analyst explores what actually happened, and as it turns out, we're looking at an abuse of everyone's favorite data analytics tool: Microsoft Excel.The companies administering the tests compile their data into plain text which appear to be CSV files. No real surprise there. Each test created multiple rows within the CSV file. Then, the people working for Public Health England imported that data into Excel… as .xls files..xls is the old Excel format, dating back into far-off years, and retained for backwards compatibility. While modern .xlsx files can support a little over a million rows, the much older format caps out at 65,536.So: these clerks imported the CSV file, hit "save as…" and made a .xls, and ended up truncating the results. With the fact that these input datasets had multiple rows per tests, "in practice it meant that each template was limited to about 1,400 cases."Again, "oops".I've discussed how much users really want to do everything in Excel, and this is clearly what happened here. The users had one tool, Excel, and it looked like a hammer to them. Arcane technical details like how many rows different versions of Excel may or may not support aren't things it's fair to expect your average data entry clerk to know.On another level, this is a clear failing of the IT services. Excel was not the right tool for this job, but in the middle of a pandemic, no one is entirely sure what they needed. Excel becomes a tempting tool, because pretty much any end user can look at complicated data and slice/shape/chart/analyze it however they like. There's a good reason why they want to use Excel for everything: it's empowering to the users. When they have an idea for a new report, they don't need to go through six levels of IT management, file requests in triplicate, and have a testing and approval cycle to ensure the report meets the specifications. They just… make it.There are packaged tools that offer similar, purpose built functionality but still give users all the flexibility they could want for slicing data. But they're expensive, and many organizations (especially government offices) will be stingy about who gets a license. They may or may not be easy to use. And of course, the time to procure such a thing was in the years before a massive virus outbreak. Excel is there, on everyone's computer already, and does what they need.Still, they made the mistake, they saw the consequences, so now we know, they will definitely start taking steps to correct the problem, right? They know that Excel isn't fit-for-purpose, so they're switching tools, right?From the BBC:
Code changes over time. Sometimes, it feels like gremlins sweep through the codebase and change it for us. Usually, though, we have changes to requirements, which drives changes to the code.Thibaut was looking at some third party code to implement tooling to integrate with it, and found this C# switch statement:
Cassi’s co-worker (previously) was writing some more PHP. This code needed to take a handful of arguments, like id and label and value, and generate HTML text inputs.Well, that seems like a perfect use case for PHP. I can’t possibly see how this could go wrong.
For every leftpad debacle, there are a thousand “utility belt” libraries for JavaScript. Whether it’s the “venerable” JQuery, or lodash, or maybe Google’s Closure library, there’s a pile of things that usually end up in a 50,000 line util.js file available for use, and packaged up a little more cleanly.Dan B had a co-worker who really wanted to start using Closure. But they also wanted to be “abstract”, and “loosely coupled”, so that they could swap out implementations of these utility functions in the future.This meant that they wrote a lot of code like:
A few months ago, Sean had some tasks around building a front-end for some dashboards. Someone on the team picked a UI library for managing their widgets. It had lovely features like handling flexible grid layouts, collapsing/expanding components, making components full screen and even drag-and-drop widget rearrangement.It was great, until one day it wasn't. As more and more people started using the front end, they kept getting more and more reports about broken dashboards, misrendering, duplicated widgets, and all sorts of other difficult to explain bugs. These were bugs which Sean and the other developers had a hard time replicating, and even on the rare occassions that they did replicate it, they couldn't do it twice in a row.Stumped, Sean took a peek at the code. Each on-screen widget was assigned a unique ID. Except at those times when the screen broke- the IDs weren't unique. So clearly, something went wrong with the ID generation, which seemed unlikely. All the IDs were random-junk, like 7902699be4, so there shouldn't be a collision, right?
Ammar A uses Node to consume an HTTP API. The API uses cookies to track session information, and ensures those cookies expire, so clients need to periodically re-authenticate. How frequently?That's an excellent question, and one that neither Ammar nor the docs for this API can answer. The documentation provides all the clarity and consistency of a religious document, which is to say you need to take it on faith that these seemingly random expirations happen for a good reason.Ammar, not feeling particularly faithful, wrote a little "watchdog" function. Once you log in, every thirty seconds it tries to fetch a URL, hopefully keeping the session alive, or, if it times out, starts a new session.That's what it was supposed to do, but Ammar made a mistake.
To my mind, code comments are important to explain why the code what it does, not so much what it does. Ideally, the what is clear enough from the code that you don’t have to. Today, we have no code, but we have some comments.Chris recently was reviewing some C# code from 2016, and found a little conversation in the comments, which may or may not explain whats or whys. Line numbers included for, ahem context.
A bit ago, Aurelia shared with us a backwards for loop. Code which wasn’t wrong, but was just… weird. Well, now we’ve got some code which is just plain wrong, in a number of ways.The goal of the following Java code is to generate some number of random numbers between 1 and 9, and pass them off to a space-separated file.
When we're laying out code standards and policies, we are, in many ways, relying on "policing by consent". We are trying to establish standards for behavior among our developers, but we can only do this with their consent. This means our standards have to have clear value, have to be applied fairly and equally. The systems we build to enforce those standards are meant to reduce conflict and de-escalate disagreements, not create them.But that doesn't mean there won't always be developers who resist following the agreed upon standards. Take, for example, Daniel's co-worker. Their CI process also runs a static analysis step against their C# code, which lets them enforce a variety of coding standards.One of those standards is: "Catch specific exceptions. Don't catch the generic Exception type unless explicitly necessary." If it is explicitly necessary, their CI system attaches "Comments" (not code comments) to the commit, so all you need to do is click the "resolve" button and provide a brief explanation of why it was necessary.This wouldn't be an… exceptional standard. Specific is always better than vague, and in this case, the rule isn't hard and fast: you're allowed to violate it if you can explain why.But explaining yourself sounds like a lot of work. Wouldn't it be easier to try and fool the static analysis tool?
Automation and tooling, especially around continuous integration and continuous deployment is standard on applications, large and small.Paramdeep Singh Jubbal works on a larger one, with a larger team, and all the management overhead such a team brings. It needs to interact with a REST API, and as you might expect, the URL for that API is different in production and test environments. This is all handled by the CI pipeline, so long as you remember to properly configure which URLs map to which environments.Paramdeep mistyped one of the URLs when configuring a build for a new environment. The application passed all the CI checks, and when it was released to the new environment, it crashed and burned. Their error handling system detected the failure, automatically filed a bug ticket, Paramdeep saw the mistake, fixed it, and everything was back to the way it was supposed to be within five minutes.But a ticket had been opened. For a bug. And the team lead, Emmett, saw it. And so, in their next team meeting, Emmett launched with, “We should talk about Bug 264.”“Ah, that’s already resolved,” Paramdeep said.“Is it? I didn’t see a commit containing a unit test attached to the ticket,” Emmett said.“I didn’t write one,” Paramdeep said, getting a little confused at this point. “It was just a misconfiguration.”“Right, so there should be a test to ensure that the correct URL is configured before we deploy to the environment.” That was, in fact, the policy: any bug ticket which was closed was supposed to have an associated unit test which would protect against regressions.“You… want a unit test which confirms that the environment URLs are configured correctly?”“Yes,” Emmett said. “There should never be a case where the application connects to an incorrect URL.”“But it gets that URL from the configuration.”“And it should check that configuration is correct. Honestly,” Emmett said, “I know I’m not the most technical person on this team, but that just sounds like common sense to me.”“It’s just…” Paramdeep considered how to phrase this. “How does the unit test tell which are the correct or incorrect URLs?”Emmett huffed. “I don’t understand why I’m explaining this to a developer. But the URLs have a pattern. URLs which match the pattern are valid, and they pass the test. URLs which don’t fail the test, and we should fallback to a known-good URL for that environment.”“And… ah… how do we know what the known-good URL is?”“From the configuration!”“So you want me to write a unit test which checks the configuration to see if the URLs are valid, and if they’re not, it uses a valid URL from the configuration?”“Yes!” Emmett said, fury finally boiling over. “Why is that so hard?”Paramdeep thought the question explained why it was so hard, but after another moment’s thought, there was an even better reason that Emmett might actually understand.“Because the configuration files are available during the release step, and the unit tests are run after the build step, which is before the release step.”Emmett blinked and considered how their CI pipeline worked. “Right, fair enough, we’ll put a pin in that then, and come back to it in a future meeting.”“Well,” Paramdeep thought, “that didn’t accomplish anything, but it was a good waste of 15 minutes.” [Advertisement] Keep the plebs out of prod. Restrict NuGet feed privileges with ProGet. Learn more.
You know how it is. The team is swamped, so you’ve pulled on some junior devs, given them the bare minimum of mentorship, and then turned them loose. Oh, sure, there are code reviews, but it’s like, you just glance at it, because you’re already so far behind on your own development tasks and you’re sure it’s fine.And then months later, if you’re like Richard, the requirements have changed, and now you’ve got to revisit the junior’s TypeScript code to make some changes.
Since HTTP is fundamentally stateless, developers have found a million ways to hack state into web applications. One of my "favorites" was the ASP.NET ViewState approach.The ViewState is essentially a dictionary, where you can store any arbitrary state values you might want to track between requests. When the server outputs HTML to send to the browser, the contents of ViewState are serialized, hashed, and base-64 encoded and dumped into an <input type="hidden"> element. When the next request comes in, the server unpacks the hidden field and deserializes the dictionary. You can store most objects in it, if you'd like. The goal of this, and all the other WebForm state stuff was to make handling web forms more like handling forms in traditional Windows applications.It's "great". It's extra great when its default behavior is to ensure that the full state for every UI widget on the page. The incident which inpsired Remy's Law of Requirements Gathering was a case where our users wanted like 500 text boxes on a page, and we blew out our allowed request sizes due to gigundous ViewState because, at the time, we didn't know about that "helpful" feature.Ryan N inherited some code which uses this, and shockingly, ViewState isn't the biggest WTF here:
Valencia made a few contributions to a large C++ project run by Harvey. Specifically, there were some pass-by-value uses of a large data structure, and changing those to pass-by-reference fixed a number of performance problems, especially on certain compilers.“It’s a simple typo,” Valencia thought. “Anyone could have done that.” But they kept digging…The original code-base was indented with spaces, but Harvey just used tabs. That was a mild annoyance, but Harvey used a lot of tabs, as his code style was “nest as many blocks as deeply as possible”. In addition to loads of magic numbers that should be enums, Harvey also had a stance that “never use an int type when you can store your number as a double”.Then, for example, what if you have a char and you want to turn the char into a string? Do you just use the std::string() constructor that accepts a char parameter? Not if you’re Harvey!
Once upon a time, there lived a man named Eric. Eric was a programmer working for the online development team of a company called The Company. The Company produced Media; their headquarters were located on The Continent where Eric happily resided. Life was simple. Straightforward. Uncomplicated. Until one fateful day, The Company decided to outsource their infrastructure to The Service Provider on Another Continent for a series of complicated reasons that ultimately benefited The Budget.Part of Eric's job was to set up web servers for clients so that they could migrate their websites to The Platform. Previously, Eric would have provisioned the hardware himself. Under the new rules, however, he had to request that The Service Provider do the heavy lifting instead.On Day 0 of our story, Eric received a server request from Isaac, a representative of The Client. On Day 1, Eric asked for the specifications for said server, which were delivered on Day 2. Day 2 being just before a long weekend, it was Day 6 before the specs were delivered to The Service Provider. The contact at The Service Provider, Thomas, asked if there was a deadline for this migration. Eric replied with the hard cutover date almost two months hence.This, of course, would prove to be a fatal mistake. The following story is true; only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. (You might want some required listening for this ... )Day 6
If you're fetching data from a remote source, "retry until a timeout is hit" is a pretty standard pattern. And with that in mind, this C++ code from Auburus doesn't look like much of a WTF.
If you want millions in VC funding, mumble the words “machine learning” and “disruption” and they’ll blunder out of the woods to just throw money at your startup.At its core, ML is really about brute-forcing a statistical model. And today’s code from Norine could have possibly been avoided by applying a little more brute force to the programmer responsible.This particular ML environment, like many, uses Python to wrap around lower-level objects. The ease of Python coupled with the speed of native/GPU-accelerated code. It has a collection of Model datatypes, and at runtime, it needs to decide which concrete Model type it should instantiate. If you come from an OO background in pretty much any other language, you’re thinking about factory patterns and abstract classes, but that’s not terribly Pythonic. Not that this developer’s solution is Pythonic either.
Trung worked for a Microsoft and .NET framework shop that used AutoMapper to simplify object mapping between tiers. Their application's mapping configuration was performed at startup, as in the following C# snippet:
Networks are complex beasts, and as they grow, they get more complicated. Diagnosing and understanding problems on networks rapidly gets hard. “Fortunately” for the world, IniTech ships one of those tools.Leonore works on IniTech’s protocol analyzer. As you might imagine, a protocol analyzer gathers a lot of data. In the case of IniTech’s product, the lowest level of data acquisition is frequently sampled voltage measurements over time. And it’s a lot of samples- depending on the protocol in question, it might need samples on the order of nanoseconds.In Leonore’s case, those raw voltage samples are the “primary data”. Now, there are all sorts of cool things that you can do with that primary data, but those computations become expensive. If your goal is to be able to provide realtime updates to the UI, you can’t do most of those computations- you do those outside of the UI update loop.But you can do some of them. Things like level crossings and timing information can be built quickly enough for the UI. These values are “secondary data”.As data is collected, there are a number of other sections of the application which need to be notified: the UI and the various high-level analysis components. Architecturally, Leonore’s team made an event-driven approach to doing this. As data is collected, a DataUpdatedEvent fires. The DataUpdatedEvent fires twice: once for the “primary data” and once for the “secondary data”. These two events always happen in lockstep, and they happen so closely together that, for all other modules in the application, they can safely be considered simultaneous, and no components in the application ever only care about one- they always want to see both the primary and the secondary data.So, to review: the data collection module outputs a pair of data updated events, one containing primary data, one containing secondary data, and can never do anything else, and these two events could basically be viewed as the same event by everything else in the application.Which raises a question about this C++/COM enum, used to tag the different events:
Zak S worked for a retailer which, as so often happens, got swallowed up by Initech's retail division. Zak's employer had a big, ugly ERP systems. Initech had a bigger, uglier ERP and once the acquisition happened, they all needed to play nicely together.These kinds of marriages are always problematic, but this particular one was made more challenging: Zak's company ran their entire ERP system from a cluster of Solaris servers- running on SPARC CPUs. Since upgrading that ERP system to run in any other environment was too expensive to seriously consider, the existing services were kept on life-support (with hardware replacements scrounged from the Vintage Computing section of eBay), while Zak's team was tasked with rebuilding everything- point-of-sale, reporting, finance, inventory and supply chain- atop Initech's ERP system.The project was launched with the code name "Cold Stone", with Glenn as new CTO. At the project launch, Glenn stressed that, "This is a high impact project, with high visibility throughout the organization, so it's on us to ensure that the deliverables are completed on time, on budget, to provide maximum value to the business and to that end, I'll be starting a series of meetings to plan the meetings and checkpoints we'll use to ensure that we have an action-plan that streamlines our…""Cold Stone" launched with a well defined project scope, but about 15 seconds after launch, that scope exploded. New "business critical" systems were discovered under every rock, and every department in the company had a moment of, "Why weren't we consulted on this plan? Our vital business process isn't included in your plan!" Or, "You shouldn't have included us in this plan, because our team isn't interested in a software upgrade, we're going to continue using the existing system until the end of time, thank you very much."The expanding scope required expanding resources. Anyone with any programming experience more complex than "wrote a cool formula in Excel" was press-ganged into the project. You know how to script sending marketing emails? Get on board. You wrote a shell script to purge old user accounts? Great, you're going to write a plugin to track inventory at retail stores.The project burned through half a dozen business analysts and three project managers, and that's before the COVID-19 outbreak forced the company to quickly downsize, and squish together several project management roles into one person."Fortunately" for Initech, that one person was Edyth, who was one of those employees who has given their entire life over to the company, and refuses to sotp working until the work is done. She was the sort of manager who would schedule meetings at 12:30PM, because she knew no one else would be scheduling meetings during the lunch hour. Or, schedule a half hour meeting at 4:30PM, when the workday ends at 5PM, then let it run long, "Since we're all here anyway, let's keep going." She especially liked to abuse video conferencing for this.As the big ball of mud grew, the project slowly, slowly eased its way towards completion. And as that deadline approached, Edyth started holding meetings which focused on testing. Which is where Edyth started to raise some concerns."Lucy," Edyth said, "I noticed that you've marked the test for integration between the e-commerce site and the IniRewards™ site as not-applicable?""Well, yeah," Lucy said. "It says to test IniRewards™ signups on the e-commerce site, but our site doesn't do that. Signups entirely happen on the IniRewards™ site. There isn't really any integration.""Oh," Edyth said. "So that sounds like it's a Zak thing?"Zak stared at his screen for a moment. He was responsible for the IniRewards™ site, a port of their pre-acquisition customer rewards system to work with Initech's rewards system. He hadn't written it, but somewhere along the way, he became the owner of it, for reasons which remain murky. "Uh… it's a static link."Edyth nodded, as if she understood what that meant. "So how long will that take to test? A day? Do you need any special setup for this test?""It's… a link. I'll click it.""Great, yes," Edyth said. "Why don't you write up the test plan document for this user story, and then we'll schedule the test for… next week? Can you do it any earlier?""I can do it right now," Zak said."No, no," Edyth said. "We need to schedule these tests in advance so you're not interacting with anyone else using the test environment. I'll set up a followup meeting to review your test plan."Test plans, of course, had a template which needed to be filled out. It was a long document, loaded with boiler plate, for the test to be, "Click the 'Rewards Signup' link in the e-commerce site footer. Expected behavior: the browser navigates to the IniRewards™ home page."Zak added the document to the project document site, labelled "IniRewards Hyper-Link Test", and waited for the next meeting with Edyth to discuss schedule. This time, Glenn, the CTO was in the meeting."This 'Hyper-Link' test sounds very important," Glenn said. He enunciated "hyper-link" like it was a word in a foreign language. "Can we move that up in the schedule? I'd like that done tomorrow.""I… can do it right now," Zak said. "It won't interact with other tests-""No, we shouldn't rush things." Glenn's eyes shifted towards another window as he reviewed the testing schedule. "It looks like there's nothing scheduled for testing between 10AM and 2PM tomorrow. Do you think four hours is enough time? Yes? Great, I'll block that off for you."Suffice to say, the test passed, and was verified quite thoroughly. [Advertisement] Otter - Provision your servers automatically without ever needing to log-in to a command prompt. Get started today!
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