The Daily WTF

Loads of languages, like Python, have some sort of "comprehension" as a form of syntactic sugar. Instead of doing something awkward like:

The challenges of doing a national integration continue to plague Sergio. More specifically, the “solutions” left behind by his predecessors continue to annoy.Sergio has inherited a system which needs to plug in to a national database. As the national integration was something which was added after the business processes were already determined, that means that certain terms/descriptors/captions/etc. are used internally than are required externally, and vice versa. So, for example, one laboratory test Sergio’s company performs might be called “QD1” internally, but is known by the government as “F3+”.As you might imagine, Sergio’s predecessors solved this with a database table called MAPPINGS. It contains all the mappings, so it might map lab test names, city codes, units of measure, group codes- just anything that could have a name that is possibly in conflict with the government’s requirements is in there. So the table has three key fields:COD1 is the internal “code” for a thing. COD2 is the government’s code. And MAP_GROUP is a category tag, probably hastily added after a naming conflict between two different TLAs.So far, so good. That all makes sense.So let’s take a look at how they query the database.

Shery was brought on to help with a project which was “going well”. “Going well” meant that all the little icons on the project management dashboard were green, which is one of the most effective ways to conceal a project which is struggling.Shery’s component was large, and it was complicated, and it had a well defined interface to the rest of the application. Specifically, they had a documented JSON message format which her code would receive via JMS. That meant she could do the vast majority of her work in isolation, without talking too much to the existing team, so she did.But the day came when they were going to send her messages. And the very first message her code received was a JSON document which looked like this: {}.That wasn’t correct. Shery’s code dutifully handled and logged the exception, and she took it on herself to diagnose the problem. She pulled up the code from the other part of the team.The first thing Shery noticed was all the code copy/pasted from StackOverflow. She could tell it was copy/pasted because that was the only code with any sort of sane indenting. All the code developed in-house used indenting stochasticly. One group of developers had clearly turned off their autoindenting in the IDE, another group hadn’t, and the result was a mishmash.Most of the code was clearly done via copy/paste. If someone wrote a block of code in one section of the application, and someone else needed that functionality, they’d just copy/paste it around. There were miles of unused imports at the top of pretty much every file, there were statements following the pattern if (someCondition) { } else if (theExactSameConditionAsTheIf) { }. Suffice to say, there were nearly as many warnings as there were lines of code.Shery decided she wasn’t going to debug or alter their code. Instead, she raised the issue she was seeing- empty messages- and politely suggested that she had noticed some “non-compliance” with the company’s coding standards which should probably be addressed, at some point.While she was busy looking at the other team’s code, someone from the other team was looking at her code. And when she checked source control, there was a fresh commit at the head of the branch where they “fixed” some of her issues.Shery had an object which provided a service. This object was itself stateful. That state should be the same everywhere in her component. So Shery created a Singleton.Setting aside the concerns of managing any sort of global state, even in a Singleton, they were doing this in Spring. Spring, like most Java containers, has all sorts of features and functionality to manage object lifecycles. In “pure” Java, if you wanted a Singleton, you might do something like this:

Nohemi has a program which needs to apply role-based security. Due to their organizational needs, the rules for role names are a bit unusual. Some roles have to be a case-insensitive match. But some roles have a more flexible pattern they need to have. This is how her co-worker implemented this:

Object oriented programming is the weapon of choice for many programmers, and when wielded properly, you can often rely on a mix of convention and strong types to make it clear what type of object you’re working with. Sometimes though, you need to check. In a language like Java, you have the instanceof operator, a boolean comparison which answers if obj instanceof SomeClass. Seeing a lot of that in a codebase is a clear code smell.Sometimes, though, not seeing it is the code smell.Chris S spotted this pattern repeatedly in their codebase:

In the 1970s, shortly before our friend Argle dared to do exactly what his boss asked of him in an efficient manner, he worked at the computer lab of a local community college. When his friend Terry was hired on as a new assistant, Argle sat down with her at the Tech Support desk for a run-down of hard-earned knowledge and best practices."The real trick to this job," Argle wrapped up, "is to realize that the only four answers you ever need to give are 'Yo,' 'Oh,' 'So,' and 'No.'""What?" Terry's brow furrowed. "That would never work!"As if on cue, a student came up to the help desk just then. "Excuse me?""Yo!" Argle greeted, turning to face him."Professor Goddard wants me to use the astronomy tutorial," the student said."Oh?" Argle prompted."Well, I don't have time today.""So?""Can I have it on a floppy disk to do it later?" the student requested.The tutorial in question was a slick program written for the PDP-11 that ran on purely text-based dumb terminals. It was ingenious for the technology of the day, but not compatible with an Apple ][ or Commodore Pet, the likely targets for the student's use.Argle wasn't about to over-explain anything to someone who wouldn't get it. "No, I'm afraid that's not possible," he said. "Sorry."The student looked disappointed, but shrugged. "OK, thanks."As he walked away, Terry doubled over in her chair and bit her lip, fighting off hysterics.With her training complete, Terry was now ready to run the help desk herself. When her first client—a professor—approached, she knew exactly how to handle the matter. "Yo!" [Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!

Sometimes, you want your dates to look like this: 3/3/2019. Other times, you want them to look like this: 03/03/2019.There are plenty of wrong ways to do this. There are far fewer right ways to do it, and they mostly boil down to “use your language’s date library.”And then there’s this, which “QuakePhil” found.

Hal was a wiz kid computer programmer at age 15 in 1976. He could make the toggle switches and LEDs on his Altair 8800 dance at will. In college, he was class valedictorian after earning his computer science degree in 1984. Hal was destined for greatness and the real world was about to get rocked.Hal's college friend Victor, who graduated two years prior, was already running his own startup company that made Unix-based financial planning software. Remembering Hal's brilliance, Victor recruited him to join his company the day after graduation. Victor needed the wiz kid-turned-wiz adult to create the equivalent of Lotus 1-2-3 in Unix. It was a tall first project but it paid well, so Hal happily signed up. Besides, everyone knew that spreadsheets were gonna change the world.Hal was so full of ideas, he felt like he could take Lotus 1-2-3 and make it better. He built Unixus 3-2-1 from scratch and vowed to turn it into a fun and useful program. Surely it was bound to make Victor's company millions upon release.Victor didn't seem to notice Hal's efforts, though. He was seldom in the office any more, the parking spot for his Porsche frequently sitting empty. Whenever Victor was actually around, he seemed disheveled and claimed to be preparing for an important sales trip. There were myriad rumors going around that he was actually out partying with the cashflow from their first big sales.One day, Hal came in to work only to find the doors chained shut. A note from Victor was taped to the door. In it, he explained how the company was going bankrupt and he had to sell it for pennies on the dollar to a larger tech firm. All of the company's assets now belonged to the new ownership, and everyone was out of a job. Hal felt crushed that he lost his first job in addition to his source code for Unixus 3-2-1.Many years went by and Hal moved on to more stable employment. He initially held a strong resentment towards Victor but it gradually faded with each passing year. Victor too had found himself some more stability and his hard partying days were over. Victor and Hal eventually reconnected through a mutual friend."Hal! Good to see you, old buddy!" Victor shouted, rising from the restaurant table he reserved for them. Hal shook his hand, less enthusiastically than Victor did. "Hey, I just want to say right away that I'm sorry about the whole company closure way back when. I was young and immature and I felt so bad about costing everyone their jobs," Victor dropped his head, showing that his 80's permed hair was long gone."Hey, don't worry about it. It wasn't a big deal," Hal downplayed, failing to mention how he used to throw darts at a picture of Victor. Hal started to open up more while they reminisced about wild college stories. Victor's memory of things… was a bit different. Specifically, he was always the center of every story. He always was the big winner in every bit of college hijinks, and if Hal remembered anything embarassing about Victor, it was Hal's memory that was faulty- Victor was King of the School.They eventually got around to talking about Unixus 3-2-1. "I know it was my first real project, but I felt like my spreadsheet program was really something. What ever happened to all the source code from that place?"Victor laughed, "Oh Hal, you won't believe this! Most of our products were scrapped or hacked to bits and repurposed. But they realized Unixus 3-2-1 had potential. They added a few finishing touches then packaged it up and sold it off. Boy, I wish I could have gotten a better deal when I sold the joint. If I had only known…"Hal failed to find any of that unbelievable. "Well, at least it made someone some money," Hal lamented. "Do you have any idea who they sold it to?""Well now, here's the crazy part," Victor paused before drawing a breath. "There was this up and coming software company around that time that rhymes with Bike-rosoft that was eager to get their hands on it. They took what you made and it became the core of a little program called Excel."Hal instantly started to regret reuniting with Victor. Whether he was full of crap or not, Hal's resentment came flooding back during the rest of their lunch together. He made an excuse to leave right after the check came, hoping to avoid something like Victor claiming he helped Al Gore create the internet. [Advertisement] ProGet supports your applications, Docker containers, and third-party packages, allowing you to enforce quality standards across all components. Download and see how!

Karl’s trials of crunch (previously) didn’t end with a badly written brain-fart. After too many consecutive late nights, Karl noticed that their grid layout was wrong.It did this:

Ginger recently finished an advanced degree, and during her work, she of course had to work as a TA for a number of classes. Computer science professors are, at least in theory, capable of programming, and thus can build automation around assignments- providing students with templates to highlight specific tools and techniques, or to automate the process of grading.Dr. Buchler taught the computer graphics course, and the ultimate assignment was to build a simple 3D game. Buchler provided a pre-scaffolded project with a set of templates that could be filled in, so the students didn’t need to worry about a lot of the boilerplate. Beyond that, Buchler didn’t offer much guidance about how students should collaborate, so students did what came naturally: they set up git repos and shared code that way.The students who used Git, which was essentially all of them, started contacting Ginger. “My code is broken!” “It worked, on my machine when I wrote it, but now it doesn’t! I haven’t changed anything!”Obviously, there must be an issue with the professor’s template, but when Ginger mentioned this to Buchler, he dismissed the concern. “I’ve been using this template for years, and have never had a problem. The students must have errors in their code.”Ginger worked closely with one of the student groups, and if there were errors in the code, she couldn’t see them. And what immediately leapt out to her was that code which worked would suddenly break- but it only seemed like it happened after a commit.The core pattern was that the students would write a fragment of a shader, and then the project would merge their fragment with a surrounding template to create a full GLSL shader that could actually execute, akin to how Shader Toy injects some additional code around your key logic.Now, when loading code into the template, Buchler had written something like this: String[] vscr = new Scanner(Paths.get(ShaderProgram.class.getResource(shader).toURI())).useDelimiter("\\Z").next().split("\r\n");There was no real reason for the split, but Buchler wanted to use an array of lines instead of a blob of text. That was also the source of the problem.The split would remove Windows line endings from the students’ code. For the students, who were frequently on Windows, this meant that when their shader got loaded, all the newlines would get stripped from their code.This meant a simple shader, like:

Chris V does compliance testing. This often means they trace through logic in code to ensure that very specific conditions about the code’s behavior and logic are met. This creates unusual situations, where they might have access to specific and relevant pieces of code, but not the entire codebase. If they spot something unusual, but not within the boundaries of their compliance tests, they just pass on by it.One of the C++ code bases Chris had to go through featured this “defensive” pattern everywhere.

Startups go through a number of phases, and one specific phase is the transition from "just get it done and worry about the consequences tomorrow" into "wait, maybe if we actually did some planning and put some process around what we do, we won't constantly be one step behind the current disaster."And that's when they start to hire people who have more management experience, but are also technical enough that they can contribute to the product directly. At BK's company, the latest hire in that category is Sylvester.Sylvester is the new team lead, and he comes from a more "enterprise" background, which means he's had a very difficult time getting up to speed, and is unwilling or uncomfortable to make decisions with limited information. And also, Sylvester might not be particularly good at the job.BK noticed that Sylvester had a commit sitting in code review, and it had been sitting there for some time, so they took a look. One of the first things they spotted was a method called SolveBug, which made it clear they were in for a "treat".

After his boss left the company, Joel C was promoted to team lead. This meant that Joel was not only responsible for their rather large production codebase, but also for interviewing new potential team members. There are a ton of coding questions that one can ask in a technical interview, and Joel figured he should ask one that they actually solve in their application: given two unordered sets of timestamps, calculate how much overlap (if any) is between the two series.If you think about it for a minute, it's really quite simple: first, find the minimum and maximum values for each set to get the start and end times (e.g. [01:08:01,01:09:55] and [01:04:11,01:09:42]). Then, subtract the later start time (01:08:01) from the earlier end time (01:09:42) to get the overlap (01:09:42 - 01:08:01 = 00:01:41). A non-positive result would indicate there's no overlap (such as 12:00:04 - 13:11:43), and in that case, it should probably just be zero. Or, in a single line of code:

“The auditors have finished examining our codebase.”That was how Randy’s boss started the meeting, and she delivered the line like a doctor who just got the tests back, and is trying to break the news gently.After someone in another department did the whole “I found a thumb drive in the parking lot, let me plug it into my work laptop!” thing, management realized that they hadn’t done any kind of security evaluation in years, and brought in a bunch of highly paid consultants to evaluate their practices. Part of that meant doing audits of their software portfolio for compliance with the new security standards.Now, Randy’s boss was running a cross-functional meeting- developers, operations, and even a few support desk representatives, to review the audit results. Most of the hits they took on the audit were the kind of slipshod stuff that accrues over years of under-budgeted, over-specced projects. Passwords stored in source control. A few SQL injection vulns. But the one that seemed like an easy win was the fact that they didn’t use any SSL on their web applications.“Oh, we should be able to fix that, easy,” Randy said.“Oh, we should, should we?” Benny, the sysadmin said. He leaned over the table, with his hands clasped. “How many SSL certs have you provisoned?”“Well, a bunch, I’ve-”“Because I have, and it’s no walk in the park, and it’s very expensive.”Randy blinked, and glanced over at his boss. She didn’t have anything to add.“That’s… not true?” Randy said. “It’s not that expensive to buy a cert, but we can also go with LetsEncrypt, which is free.”“Ah ha!” Benny said. “It’s very expensive to do it right. You can’t just use some service from the Internet. We’re here to talk about our security audit, and using LetsEncrypt is not possible. Anything hosted externally and accessible via the Internet poses a huge organizational risk. Free SSL from the Internet is an easy target for a hacker.”“Right,” Randy’s boss said. “We’ll table this for now, but it looks like we probably won’t add SSL until we have a better sense of the costs.”“My advice is that we don’t use SSL at all,” Benny said. “That will be more secure than what Randy’s proposing.”The audit happened early this year. No one has yet formulated a plan to move to SSL. [Advertisement] Utilize BuildMaster to release your software with confidence, at the pace your business demands. Download today!

A good variable name is clear and specific about what the variable does. But sometimes you can have a variable name that's perhaps a little too specific. Victoria found this representative line of Rust code:

Nancy was recently handed a pile of "modern" PHP that weighs in at tens of thousands of lines of code.This is how every query is executed:

As promised in the sneak peak, we have a very special Halloween feature planned for today! What Lives Beyond the Blue Screen is an animated story by Lorne Kates (voiced by Jack Rhysider), made in collaboration with our new friends at Human Readable Magazine:An everyday programmer decides to clean up the mess of his company's infrastructure before the big merger only to accidentally run the wrong command on the wrong location. Join the adventure as they rush to fix the mistake before they bring down the entire company.This will be you live-streamed premier, in just a few hours, at 1:00PM Eastern. Stay tuned!About Human Readable MagazineWe’re able to bring this to you thanks to Panagiotis “Pek” Peikidis. In addition to having an even more Greek name than mine, Pek is embarking on a remarkably awesome – and a bit insane – journey. He’s launching Human Readable Magazine: an actual paper magazine (available digitally too) that will take developers on technical deep dives to expand and challenge their knowledge of programming every month.It’s a kickstarter project that you should all go check out. Pek was inspired to start this after finding a lot of success with Morning Cup of Coding, a newsletter that shares programming articles from every field of programming.Creating quality content isn’t easy, but from what I’ve seen from Issue 0 Preview, and the creativity in the upcoming Halloween collaboration, Pek is up for the challenge. With our support, we can help make Human Readable Magazine a fixture of the programming community and have a lot more fun collaborations in the future. [Advertisement] Ensure your software is built only once and then deployed consistently across environments, by packaging your applications and components. Learn how today!

In C, it’s not uncommon to define a macro like this one:#define MIN(a,b) (a>b?b:a)It’s useful to be able to quickly find the smallest of two numbers, and it’s useful to do that with something a bit more readable than a ternary.Of course, if you need to expand this to larger sets of numbers, it gets tricky. For example, maybe you need to find the smallest of three numbers.Agripina recently had to track down some strange behaviors in an IoT device, and found this stack of ternaries:

Blake had recently been hired as a software tester, tasked with testing the company's product on the latest operating system, Windows 2000. After running through his battery of tests, he informed management that he hadn't encountered any issues, and the product was dubbed Windows 2000-ready. During the next several weeks, the product was smoothly deployed by customers—until an installer bug report came in."Did you test the desktop shortcut after installing on Windows 2000?" Blake's manager, Sammy, asked from the threshold of Blake's cube."Yeah, I'm sure I did," Blake replied."A customer emailed us to say that when he chooses to add the desktop shortcut while installing, it causes a Blue Screen of Death," Sammy explained. "It happens consistently for him. The only way he can install successfully is to not choose the desktop shortcut option, which he calls 'unacceptable from an IT security standpoint.'"Blake frowned in confusion. "Security?""I know, it's weird," Sammy said. "I want to question him further on that point. In the meantime, I'd like for you to start looking into this."The first step was to reproduce the problem in-house. Blake was sure he would fail; he was absolutely certain that he'd already tested what was allegedly crashing. His first move was to install the product on a fresh Windows 2000 box. He checked the "Add a desktop shortcut" option, and after a few moments, the installer completed with no errors. A shortcut to run the program now sat on the desktop. Double-clicking the icon opened the program flawlessly.From there, Blake uninstalled and reinstalled the program. Yet again, no issues. Trying a different Windows 2000 PC was fruitless. Out of desperation, he even tried installing on Windows 98. In no case did a BSOD ever occur."I can't reproduce this bug," Blake told Sammy the next time the two were able to meet up in the latter's office. "The installer doesn't crash the system, and the desktop shortcut works fine. Is there something I'm missing?""Well, I just got some more info from the customer," Sammy said, with world-weariness bearing down upon him. "Did you try installing to the desktop?""Yes, I installed the desktop shortcut. Many, many times.""No, not the shortcut. I mean, install to the desktop.""To the desktop?" Blake repeated, frowning."The customer's corporate security policy considers program shortcuts untrustworthy. They fear they could be pointing to anything," Sammy explained. "To avoid any sort of issue along those lines, the customer is required to install all of his programs into separate folders on the desktop."Blake's jaw fell. "What?!"Sammy shrugged helplessly. "First they want to install shortcuts, now they don't trust shortcuts. I don't get it, either, but it doesn't matter. It should be possible to install our software into any valid folder without a BSOD. Go see if you can dupe this now."Blake slinked back to his desk. Much to his chagrin, he was able to reproduce the crash. Upon further investigation, it was discovered that the installer could crash the OS if one tried to install to a new folder on the desktop or in the user's Documents folder. Blake received a scolding from Sammy for missing this the first time around.It was a lesson well learned. In the years that followed, Blake strove to test every possible scenario, every fringe use case, every baffling type of input data that he could think of. Upon submitting his bug reports, he heard the occasional bemused comment from the developers: "Who in the real world would ever do that?"Blake would merely chuckle to himself, remembering the desktop shortcut. [TDWTF Survey Reminder] Don't miss your chance to tell managers what you REALLY think about good (and WTF-worthy) dev mentorship. You might win a TDWTF mug for participating!

A long time ago, when I was first learning about databases, one of the points brought up was the difference between a "natural key" and a "surrogate key". A natural key was a unique identifier which already existed in your dataset, and surrogate keys were those you made up- UUIDs or sequences or what have you.As a best practice, even if you have a viable natural key, you should still use a surrogate key. There are exceptions, but it's usually preferable to employ a database key which you control to provide identity, especially one which has no meaning- because that means it'll never need to change values.Adam H's co-worker never got this memo.They needed to store data about vehicles. The particular data being stored, in this case, was also time series data. So they decided that their key would be a mashup of the timestamp and the vehicle's 6-digit license plate number.There were a number of problems with this: not every record entered into this table was actually tied directly to a vehicle, so sometimes the license plate number was blank. The developer needed to avoid any key collisions, so they decided to randomly generate a value, which was hopefully "random enough".

I’m totally stoked for what we have brewing for Halloween. It’s called What Lives Beyond the Blue Screen, and we’ve got a fun sneak peak for you:We’re able to bring this to you thanks to Panagiotis “Pek” Peikidis. In addition to having an even more Greek name than mine, Pek is embarking on a remarkably awesome – and a bit insane – journey. He’s launching Human Readable Magazine: an actual paper magazine (available digitally too) that will take developers on technical deep dives to expand and challenge their knowledge of programming every month.It’s a kickstarter project that you should all go check out. Pek was inspired to start this after finding a lot of success with Morning Cup of Coding, a newsletter that shares programming articles from every field of programming.Creating quality content isn’t easy, but from what I’ve seen from Issue 0 Preview, and the creativity in the upcoming Halloween collaboration, Pek is up for the challenge. With our support, we can help make Human Readable Magazine a fixture of the programming community and have a lot more fun collaborations in the future.In the mean time, stay tuned… What Lives Beyond the Blue Screen is coming next week!

Rick was recently looking at some code from another team at his company. He noticed something odd in the code, so he pinged the team lead, Linda. “Did you spot this?”“Oh, crap no,” Linda replied. “I should have caught this in code review, but I gotta be honest, Teddy is a bit… well, let’s just say I really should have caught that since I knew it was a Teddy commit.”Rick didn’t know much about Teddy, beside the fact that Teddy had a few years of experience. Certainly, he had enough experience to be familiar with Java programming, like working with enums and working with unit tests. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to understand them.

Nearly fifteen years ago, I wrote Pounding A Nail: Old Shoe or Glass Bottle?. It opened by asking how one might respond to the following question:

Matt enjoyed teaching. He mentored junior devs and interns with no technological backgrounds, and helped them to be experienced programmers. He believed that employers should hire based on attitude and then train employees up on skills.That was before he met Derrick.Matt wasn’t entirely clear on how Derrick became an junior dev at their company. Maybe he was pushed by his parents or grandparents to get into that “new tech field”, or maybe he was someone’s son, or a family friend of an executive.To say that Derrick lacks technical experience is an understatement. Matt’s seen Amish farmers at the local market with a better understanding of programming. He proudly uses an antique flip phone, because that way the government can’t track him. The company uses two factor authentication via an app, and bought him a phone which supports the app. He leaves the phone at his desk and only uses it to log in. He writes code in Notepad where possible, because it’s installed on every computer and anything else is just excess.Worst, Derrick was mostly good natured and wanted to help, but didn’t understand why he needed mentoring and guidance.Most recently, Matt was trying to introduce Derrick to the life of being “full stack”, which is to say- getting data from the back end and building a report on the front end. In this case, it was a marketing report for tracking clicks related to a marketing campaign.It’s been rough going. While reviewing a recent changeset, Matt spotted a problem and messaged Derrick on Slack. “Hey, Derrick, that new module you just delivered? You added a bunch of count fields, but you’ve made them all text fields. Can you change them to be numeric? They’re counts, so they can’t be anything else.”“Sure, Matt,” Derrick replied, “but hey, not to get down on your mentoring, but you really ought to specify these things precisely.”Matt nearly choked on his coffee, internally screaming, “are you serious?” Matt cursed to himself and then gave himself 15 minutes to cool down, before replying back.“Sorry, Derrick,” Matt typed, “but I forget you may not be aware of the standards that are employed…” Matt typed everywhere, but decided to be more subtle, and replaced it with, “…here. But usually, if something is a type of number, we keep it as that numeric type. Sometimes this is an integer, a float, a decimal. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me. For now, can you change the text field to integers? We are counting clicks, so those are integers.”“Yeah, okay,” Derrick responded. “I’ll make them numbers.”An hour later, Derrick submitted another changeset.“Hey, Derrick,” Matt messaged again, “Those count fields you set as numbers. They seem to be floating point numbers. Could you change them to integers? They’re counts. Some of the summaries are showing rounding errors- 4.99999997, etc.”“Yeah, sure thing, Matt,” Derrick replied. “But hey, you really ought to specify these things precisely.”In a fit of restraint, Matt did not quote his earlier message requesting that Derrick use integers. Matt knew he could count on many things, but the one thing he couldn’t count on was Derrick. [Advertisement] ProGet supports your applications, Docker containers, and third-party packages, allowing you to enforce quality standards across all components. Download and see how!

Way back in the 90s, in an era when Swedish pop bands were getting regular US radio play and CVS was the optimal source control system, Alan worked on a remote-execution service for a “Unix-like” OS. One of his co-workers had just left the company, and Alan needed to track down a bug in a module which the co-worker had more-or-less owned during their tenure.The specific block of C code in question looked roughly like this:

The last time I was traveling, I noticed a little stand just past the security checkpoint, asking me to rate my experience. The five buttons ranged from a red frowny face to a green smiley, giving me the ability to respond with what must be the full range of human emotion. Every time I see one of those kiosks, I have to wonder: who uses those things, and who actually looks at the data?Perhaps inspired by that kiosk, Peter's company does something similar. There's a Slack bot which messages each employee every two weeks to get them to evaluate, on a scale of 1-5, how good a certain aspect of their job is. That data gets collected up onto a Google Sheets dashboard. And yes, the Google Sheet is both the datastore and the dashboard, which isn't surprising at all.Now, if you're using a regular old SQL database, you know that you shouldn't manually construct SQL strings, and instead use prepared statements, etc. to manipulate the data. But what if a spreadsheet is your database? Well, those rules go out the window, as this Scala block demonstrates:

When logging in Java, especially frameworks like Spring, making sure the logging statement has access to the full context of the operation in flight is important. Instead of spamming piles of logging statements in your business logic, you can use a “mapped diagnostic context” to cache useful bits of information during an operation, such that any logging statement can access it.One of the tools for this is the “Mapped Data Context”, MDC. Essentially, it’s very much like a great big hash map that happens to be thread-local and is meant to be used by the logging framework. It’s a global-ish variable, but without the worst side effects of being global.And you know people just love to use global variables.Lothar was trying to figure out some weird requests coming out of an API, and needed to know where certain session ID values were coming from. There are a lot of “correct” ways to store session information in your Java Spring applications, and he assumed that was how they were storing those things. Lothar was wrong.He provided this anonymized/generalized example of how pretty much every one of their REST request methods looked:

Nobody wants to have a Bobby Tables moment in their database. So we need to to sanitize our inputs. Ted C noticed a bunch of stored procedures which contained lines like this:

The accountants at Gary's company had a problem: sometimes, when they wanted to check the price to ship a carton of product, that price was zero. No one had, as of yet, actually shipped product for free, but they needed to understand why certain cartons were showing up as having zero cost.The table which tracks this, CartonFee, has three fields: ID, Carton, and Cost. Carton names are unique, and things like 12x3x6, or Box1, or even Large box. So, given a carton name, it should be pretty easy to update the cost, yes? The stored procedure which does this, spQuickBooks_UpdateCartonCost should be pretty simple.

Graham picked up a ticket regarding their password system. It seemed that several users had tried to put in a perfectly valid password, according to the rules, but it was rejected.Graham's first step was to attempt to replicate on his own, but couldn't do it. So he followed up with one of the end users, and got them to reveal the password they had tried to use. That allowed him to trigger the bug, so he dug into the debugger to find the root cause.

Sometimes, a block of terrible code exists for a good reason. Usually, it exists because someone was lazy or incompetent, which while not a good reason, at least makes sense. Sometimes, it exists for a stupid reason.Janet’s company recently bought another company, and now the new company had to be integrated into their IT operations. One of the little, tiny, minuscule known-issues in the new company’s system was that their logging was mis-configured. Instead of putting a new-line after each logging message, it put only a single space.That tiny problem was a little bit larger, as each log message was a JSON object. The whole point of logging out a single JSON document per line was that it would be easy to parse/understand the log messages, but since they were all on a single line, it was impossible to just do that.The developers at the acquired company were left with a choice: they could fix the glitch in the logging system so that it output a newline after each message, or they could just live with this. For some reason, they decided to live with it, and they came up with this solution for parsing the log files:

Deon (previously) has some good news. His contract at Initrode is over, and he’s on his way out the door. But before he goes, he wants to share more of his pain with us.You may remember that the StringManager class had a bunch of data type conversions to numbers and dates. Well guess what, there’s also a DateManager class, which is another 1600 lines of methods to handle dates.As you might expect, there are a pile of re-invented conversion and parsing methods which do the same thing as the built-in methods. But there’s also utility methods to help us handle date-related operations.

Properly used, version history can easily help you track down and identify the source of a bug. Improperly used, it still can. As previously established, the chief architect Dana works with has some issues with source control.Dana works on a large, complex embedded system. “Suddenly”, her team started to spot huge piles of memory corruption problems. Something was misbehaving, but it was hard to see exactly what.They ported Valgrind to their platform, just so they could try and figure out what was going wrong. Eventually, they tracked the problem down to a pair of objects.In the flow of the code, the correct path was that object A, which we’ll call Monster would be allocated. Then a second object would be allocated. Somehow, Monster instances were corrupting the memory of the second object.How does an object allocated earlier corrupt the memory of an object allocated later? Well, “before” and “after” have different meaning when your code is multi-threaded, which this was. Worse, the Monster class was katamari of functionality rolled up across thousands of lines of code. Obviously, there had to be a race condition- but a quick glance at all the Monster methods showed that they were using a mutex to avoid the race condition.Or were they? Dana looked more closely. One of the methods called during the initialization process, doSomething, was marked const. In C++, that should mean that the method doesn’t change any property values. But if it doesn’t change any property values, how can it lock the mutex?This is where walking through the commit history tells a story. “Fortunately” this was before Jerry learned you could amend a commit, so each step of his attempts to get the code to compile are recorded for posterity.The chain of commits started with one labeled “Add Feature $X”, and our doSomething method looked like this.

The first two major releases of the .NET Framework, 1.0 and 1.1 were… not good. It's so long ago now that they're easily forgotten, but it's important to remember that a lot of core language features weren't in the framework until .NET 2.0.Like generics. Generics haven't always been part of the language, but they've been in the language since 2006. The hope would be that, in the course of 13 years, developers would learn to use this feature.Russell F (recently) has a co-worker who is still working on it.

Every change breaks someones workflow.A few years ago, Ian started at one of the many investment banks based out of London. This particular bank was quite proud of how they integrated “the latest technology” into all their processes, “favoring the bleeding edge,” and “are always focusing on Agile methods, and cross-functional collaboration.”That last bit is why every software developer was on a tech support rotation. Every two weeks, they’d have to spend a day sitting with the end users, watching them work. Ostensibly, by seeing how the software was actually used, the developers would have a better sense of the users’ needs. In practice, they mostly showed people how to delete emails or recover files from the recycling bin.Unfortunately, these end users also directly or indirectly controlled the bank’s budgeting process, so keeping them happy was a big part of ensuring continued employment. Not just service, but service with a smile- or else.Ian’s problem customer was Jacob. Jacob had been with the bank at least thirty years, and still longed for the days of lunchtime brandy and casual sexual harassment. He did not like computers. He did not like the people who serviced his computer. He did not like it when a web page displayed incorrectly, and he especially did not like it when you explained that you couldn’t edit the web page you didn’t own, and couldn’t tell Microsoft to change Internet Explorer to work with that particular website.“I understand you smart technical kids are just a cost of doing business,” Jacob would often say, “but your budget is out of control. Something must be done!”Various IT projects proceeded apace. Jacob continued to try and cut their budget. And then the Windows 7 rollout happened.This was a massive effort. They had been on Windows XP. A variety of intranet and proprietary applications didn’t work on Windows 7, and needed to be upgraded. Even with those upgrades, everyone knew that there would be more problems. These big changes never came without unexpected side effects.The day Jacob got Windows 7 imaged onto his computer also happened to be the day Ian was on helldesk duty. Ian got a frantic email:

Some folks were perplexed by the fact that Microsoft skipped Windows 9 and went straight to Windows 10. The urban legend is that so many old applications checked which version of Windows was running by doing something like version.startsWith("Windows 9") to see if they were on 95 or 98, that Microsoft risked breaking otherwise working code if they released Windows 9.But gone are those days of doing string munging to check which version of an OS we’re running on. We’ve got much better ways to check what features and functionality are available without having to parse strings out, right?John D found some TypeScript code in a Ionic app that needs to adapt to different versions of iOS:

Gather 'round, young'uns, for a tale from the Dark Ages of mobile programming: the days before the iPhone launched. Despite what Apple might have you believe, the iPhone wasn't the first portable computing device. Today's submitter, Jack, was working for a company that streamed music to these non-iPhone devices, such as the Palm Treo or the Samsung Blackjack. As launch day approached for the new client for Windows Mobile 6, our submitter realized that he'd yet to try the client on a non-phone device (called a PDA, for those of you too young to recall). So he tracked down an HP iPaq on eBay just so he could verify that it worked on a device without the phone API.The device arrived a few days out from launch, after QA had already approved the build on other devices. It should've been a quick test: sideload the app, stream a few tracks, log in, log out. But when Jack opened the app for the first time on the new device, it was already logged into someone's account! He closed it and relaunched, only to find himself in a different, also inappropriate account. What on earth?!The only thing Jack could find in common between the users he was logged in as was that they were running the same model of PDA. That was the crucial key to resolving the issue. To distinguish which device was making the calls to the streaming service, Jack used a call in Windows Mobile that would return a unique ID for each mobile device. In most devices, it would base this identifier on the IMEI, ensuring uniqueness—but not on the HP iPaq. All HP devices could automatically log into the account of the most recently used iPaq, providing the user logged out and back in, as it would generate a recent-user record with the device ID.Jack had read the documentation many times, and it always stated that the ID was guaranteed to be unique. Either HP had a different definition of "unique" than anyone else, or they had a major security bug!Jack emailed HP, but they had no plans to fix the issue, so he had to whip up an alternate method of generating a UUID in the case that the user was on this device. The launch had to be pushed back to accommodate it, but the hole was plugged, and life went on as usual. [Advertisement] ProGet can centralize your organization's software applications and components to provide uniform access to developers and servers. Check it out!

Initech is a large, international corporation. Any time you're doing business at a global scale, you're going to need to contend with a language barrier sooner or later. This makes employees who are multilingual valuable.Dana recently joined Initech, and in the first week, was warned about Jerry. Jerry was the "chief" "architect" and team "lead", and was one of those special, valuable employees who spoke three languages. Correction, "spoke" needs scare quotes too, because Jerry was incomprehensible in every language he spoke, including his native tongue.Jerry's emails were stuff of legend around the office. Punctuation was included, not to structure sentences, but as a kind of decoration, just to spice up his communiques. Capitalization was applied at random. Sentences weren't there to communicate a single thought or idea, but to express fragments of half considered dreams.Despite being the "chief architect", Jerry's code was about as clear as his emails. His class definitions were rambling stretches of unrelated functionality, piled together into a ball of mud. Splattered through it all were blocks of commented out functionality. And 99.9% of his commits to master had syntax errors.Why did his commits always have syntax errors? Jerry had never seen fit to install a C++ compiler on his machine, and instead pushed to master and let their CI system compile and find all his syntax errors. He'd then amend the commit to fix the errors, and woe betide anyone else working in the repo, because he'd next git push --force the amended commit. Then he'd fix the new round of syntax errors.Their organization did have an official code review standard, but since no one understood any of Jerry's code, and Jerry was the "chief", Jerry reviewed his own code.So, let's talk about enumerated types. A common practice in C++ enums is to include an extra value in the enum, just to make it easy to discover the size of the enum, like so:

I don’t know the length of Russell F’s commute. Presumably, the distance is measured in miles. Miles and miles. I say that, because of this block, which is written… with care.