The Daily WTF

Learning about data structures- when to use them, how to use them, and why- is a make-or-break moment for a lot of programmers. Some programmers master this. Some just get as far as hash maps and call it a day, and some… get inventive.Let’s say, for example, that you’re Jim J’s coworker. You have an object called a Closing. A Closing links two Entrys. This link is directed, so entry 1->2 is one Closing, while 2->1 is another. In real-world practice, though, two Closings that are linked together in both directions should generally be interacted with as pairs. So, 1->2 and 2->1 may not be the same object, but they’re clearly related.Jim’s coworker wanted to gather all the pairs were together, and put them into groups, so 1->2 and 2->1 are one group, while 3->1 and 1->3 are another. This was their approach.

UUIDs and GUIDs aren’t as hard as dates, but boy, do they get hard, don’t they. Just look at how many times they come up. It’s hard to generate a value that’s guaranteed to be unique. And there’s a lot of ways to do it- depending on your needs, there are some UUIDs that can be sorted sequentially, some which can be fully random, some which rely on hash algorithms, and so on.Of course, that means, for example, your UUIDs aren’t sequential. Even with time-based, they’re not in sequence. They’re just sortable.Pitming S had a co-worker which wanted them to be sequential.

Bogdan Olteanu picked up a simple-sounding bug. There was a drop-down list in the application which was missing a few entries. Since this section of the app wasn't data-driven, that meant someone messed up when hard-coding the entries into the dropdown.Bogdan was correct. Someone messed up, alright.

Many years ago, Sebastian worked for a company which sold self-assembled workstations and servers. One of the company's top clients ordered a server as a replacement for their ancient IBM PS/2 Model 70. The new machine ran Windows NT Server 4.0 and boasted an IPC RAID controller, along with other period-appropriate bells and whistles. Sebastian took a trip out to the client site and installed the new server in the requested place: a table in front of the receptionist's desk, accessible by anyone walking through the main entrance. Not the best location from a security standpoint, but one of the new server's primary tasks in life would be to serve the company's telephone directory, installed on CD-ROM.Two weeks later, the client called back, irate over the fact that the new server performed terribly compared to their old one. Troubleshooting efforts via phone were ineffective; the client demanded on-site support. After several frantic conference calls involving Sales, Support, and nosebleed-level management, Sebastian was on a plane back to the client site.Once back within the client's stuffy lobby, he could see that the server setup had in fact changed since he'd last been there, despite the client's repeated insistence to the contrary. Someone had placed both the old and new server boxes under the table. Two CRT monitors sat side-by-side on the table along with their corresponding mice. The keyboards were on a roll-out drawer just under the surface. Both machines were already logged in as administrator, waiting for anyone to come along and not exploit that fact.After checking in with his on-site contact and securing a cup of coffee, Sebastian got to troubleshooting. First thing, he used the mouse to open the Start menu on the new server—but as soon as he released the mouse button, the Start menu collapsed. He tried a few more times with no success.Frowning, Sebastian rolled out the keyboard drawer, hoping to try a keyboard shortcut next. When he did so, he found the keyboards set up one in front of the other. The strain relief on the back of the old server's keyboard was sitting right on top of the space bar of the new server's keyboard. Apparently, it'd been holding down the space bar for the past two weeks straight.Sebastian pulled the old server keyboard onto the table. Sure enough, the new server behaved normally from then on. Thousands of dollars spent, hundreds of miles flown—all to lift one keyboard away from another. [Advertisement] Forget logs. Next time you're struggling to replicate error, crash and performance issues in your apps - Think Raygun! Installs in minutes. Learn more.

If you're reading this message, then it means that I managed to successfully migrate TheDailyWTf.com and the related settings from our old server (74.50.110.120) to the new server (162.252.83.113).Shameless plug: I did all of this by setting up a configuration role in our internally-hosted Otter instance for both old and new servers (to make sure configuration was identical), deploying the last successful build to the new server using our internally-hosted BuildMaster instance, and then manually installing the certificate and configuring the database. Here's what the OtterScript looks like for the server's configuration. I'd love to move this to a publically-hosted instance, soon!

“Hey, apparently, the SSL cert on our web-service expired… in 2013.”Laura’s company had a web-service that provided most of their business logic, and managed a suite of clients for interacting with that service. Those clients definitely used SSL to make calls to that web-service. And Laura knew that there were a bunch of calls to ValidateServerCertificate as part of the handshaking process, so they were definitely validating it, right?

We already know that Kara’s office has a problem with strings. Kara’s back again, with more string related troubles.These troubles are a bit worse, once we add in some history. You see, some of their software does machine control. That is to say, it sends commands to some bit of machinery, which then moves or extrudes or does whatever the machine does. Kara wasn’t specific, only granted that this machine was neither large enough or mean enough to kill someone. Minor cuts, burns, scrapes, bruises and damage to the equipment itself is still possible, but nobody will die.Once upon a time, the bulk of this code was written in C. Then someone wanted a better UI. So that C code got replaced by the perfectly natural solution of… Visual Basic. There’s still some C in there somewhere, hidden behind interops and marshalled calls to native code, but most of the GUI and logic is pure VB.Net. Which brings us to our representative line.

Ah, WordPress. If you hadn't heard of it by reputation, it sounds pretty good: one platform where you can build a blog, an e-commerce site, an app, or some combination of all of the above. Their site is slick, and their marketing copy sounds impressive: "Beautiful designs, powerful features, and the freedom to build anything you want. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time." With WordPress, the hype insists, anyone can build a website without having to know anything about coding. Just pick a template, add free modules, and it'll look great without any effort.If you've worked anywhere remotely connected to web design, you've heard of WordPress, and likely by reputation. The engine has maintained backwards compatibility since day one, which means it's the usual spaghetti system of duct tape and prayers you get when you prioritize backwards compatibility over systems engineering. It was more of a success than the designers intended, having been built solely as a (pretty decent) blogging platform at first, so the more use cases it expands to cover, the worse the learning curve becomes. Many web designers refuse to touch the system at all, preferring to roll something by hand that they understand than to untangle the snarl of "free" modules their clients installed when something goes wrong.Two days before launch, Lukas was nearly done with a contract job: a custom marketing site with a contact form, exactly the kind of thing Wordpress has for Use Case #2. Testing the site before handing it over, he noticed one page loading slowly. VERY slowly. Like, 60 seconds slowly.It seemed odd that a page with only static resources could even be that slow, so he ran a profile on the page:For those of you who don't speak browser profile, that's the CSS engine that's stalling out for a whole minute. Usually, unless you're doing awful things in your CSS or have megabytes worth of it to render, the CSS engine is very fast; the usual culprit in Wordpress is client-side Javascript. But the CSS looked perfectly fine—messy and WordPressy, but fine, once it was all compiled.Searching for answers, Lukas compared the markup on the page to the CSS stylesheet, trying to deduce what it was doing. A fancy heading here, a custom font there ... everything looked normal until he got to the top of the footer area, where he found the totally normal and not at all strange sequence of 131,074 empty paragraph tags.Did I mention WordPress is built in PHP?Some rogue bit of PHP code had gone into a horrible loop, dumping out empty paragraph tags 131,074 times right before the footer element. Pages upon pages of <p> with nary a </p> in sight. Paragraph tags default to display:block, meaning every time the engine gets to one, it causes the browser to execute layout, paint, and composite operations on the rest of the page—including the up to 131,073 other paragraph tags it may have already encountered. And this gnarly bit of nothing began after 1,482 lines of useful HTML, so it wasn't as if the page were tiny to begin with.It gets better: this was all just before the custom footer, which can have inline CSS in WordPress, as it's a quick way to tweak a theme without having to create what's called a "child theme." The client had some inline CSS in place, and yes, it applied to the paragraph tag. It set padding-bottom: 0px !important;, forcing the CSS engine to re-render the entire set of paragraph tags once more.And that's why no matter how good platforms become, no matter how rich the plugin ecosystem, there will always be work for web devs. [Advertisement] Utilize BuildMaster to release your software with confidence, at the pace your business demands. Download today!

Operator overloading is a messy prospect. In theory, it means that you can naturally extend a language so that you can operate on objects naturally. An introductory CS class might have students implement a Ratio or Fraction class, then overload arithmetic operators so you can (a + b).reduce().In practice, it means you use the bitshift operator also as the stream insertion operator. Thanks C++.Java decided to chuck the baby out with the bathwater, and simply didn't allow operator overloading, but this introduced its own challenges. How do I tell if one instance of MyObject type is greater than another instance? That's important if I want to sort these objects, for example.Thus, Java has the Comparator interface. Implement Comparator<MyObject> and now you can compare two instances of that object. The comparator object can be passed to all sorts of built-in methods for sorting, filtering, etc. At least, that's the theory.An anonymous submitter found this unique approach to that problem.

"The hurrider I go, the behinder I get," is one of the phrases I like to trot out any time a project schedule slips and a PHB or PM decides the solution is either crunch or throwing more bodies at the project.Karl had one of those bosses, and ended up in the deep end of crunch. Of course, when that happens, mistakes happen, and everything gets further behind, or you're left with a mountain of technical debt because you forgot that Integer.TryParse was a function in C#.Which is what happened to Karl. And that's why Karl wrote… this.

Ah, the enumerated type. At its core, it's really just a compile-time check to ensure that this constant containing 1 isn't getting confused with this other constant, also containing 1.We usually ignore the actual numbers in our enums, though not always. Perhaps, though, we should just pay more attention to them in general, that way we don't end up with code like Andrew found.

Every "enterprise" shop has that one system you hope you never need to touch. It's older than you are, "documentation" consists of whispers and rumors about its behavior, and it is absolutely 100% business critical. If it goes down, the business goes down.Fortunately, you'll never have to touch that system, because there's an Ancient Wizard who has been sitting in the same cube since 1973, and knows its secrets. As long as the Wizard is around, you'll never touch it. Of course, if the system goes down when the Wizard is out of the office… well, fixing that would require a Christmas miracle.Renee was a programmer-elf in Santa's Workshop. It was a huge organization with many layers of middle-elfagent, so 90% of her job was sitting in pointless meetings with no agenda. In the remaining 10%, she occasionally added features to their in-house legal invoice processing software. Since nearly every present they shipped was an elf-produced knockoff of a large company's trademarks, legal billing was one of the Workshop's largest line items.There were other important IT systems. Supply chain was massive. All raw materials, aside from the naturally-occurring candy canes, had to be imported. Whether it was fabric for producing dolls, or ABS plastic and injection molds for producing dolls action figures. While shipping had a special organizational importance, IT rarely was engaged. The CEC (Chief Executive Claus) had learned to do pivot tables and VLOOKUPs in Excel, and did all his shipment planning himself.The 100% business-critical mystery system was NNOSE: Naughty/Nice Observation and System Evaluator. It was the "source of truth" for the all important TPS reports: Total Presents Sacked. The Ancient Wizard who cared for it was literally an Ancient Wizard, Merlin. And yes, Merlin really was Santa's sidekick. NNOSE ran on a piece of NORAD surplus computer hardware and was programmed in a dialect of MUMPS nicknamed "Sugar LUMPS" or just "LUMPS". Merlin was the only one who knew how the system worked and what the system did, and Merlin was the only one who was ever supposed to touch it.As the clock clicked closer to 12/24, the shipping deadline, the Workshop got busier and busier, while software developers got less and less busy. Since time was critical, no software changes went into production unless there was an absolute show-stopping bug. The software teams basically were on an extended break until the New Year, and no code releases would happen until mid-January at the earliest.So, during the busiest, most critical time of the year, the development team mostly spent their vacation hours. Merlin was out in Avalon, trying to patch things up with his ex. The senior Project Elfagers were on a retreat in Cancun. All through the shop, not a developer was stirring, aside from Renee. Renee loved to work during the quietest time of the year, when no one scheduled any meetings. It was its own kind of vacation…… at least until Hermie, the lead developer who really wanted to be an MBA, popped his head into her cube."NNOSE is down. The Big Guy just tried to pull the final TPS report for the year, and not only did it not have a cover sheet, it printed ten pages of errors instead of data. I've already tried to raise Merlin, but he's not on Slack, and there's no cell service in Avalon."If the TPS report were wrong or unavailable, Santa couldn't accurately match kids up with presents. Naughty kids could get great gifts, nice ones might get useless garbage like an Amazon Echo or Google Home. He needed that report."Okay, but I know the report has been run previously," Renee said. "Can't they just run with an old version?""There aren't any old versions. TPSes get shredded after review, ever since GDPR went into effect."Against her better judgment, Renee set down her hot cocoa and said, "I'll see what I can do."Merlin didn't keep any digital documentation for NNOSE. Everything about the system was stored in binders full of parchment in his cube. Calling the contents "documentation" would be generous. Merlin had written most of it in High Enochian, and what little bits were in Elvish just seemed to be rants and raves about changes management had requested, and how wrong those changes were. The only system diagram was arranged into an Elder Sign. The most useful thing Renee found in her first pass were post-it notes with login credentials for the various bits.Still, it was enough for Renee to start piecing together the system. The TPS report came from data managed by NNOSE, but the mainframe-based CLI interface had been abandoned circa 2002. At that point, someone had purchased an expensive mainframe integration package from Initech, which was basically a way of slapping XML/SOAP webservices on top of existing mainframe code. A few years later, someone had slapped together a VB.NET (framework version 1.0) UI which called into that webservice. The VB.NET program actually extracted and printed the report.Great! Renee kind of knew Visual Basic, or at least could fake it. And it wasn't LUMPS. She started by testing the NNOSE XML interface- she sent a few SOAP requests manually and verified that she got correct output. Then she fired up the VB.NET app. It had a basic UI for setting filters and criteria, but once you hit "run report", everything—even the error messages—went to the printer. Worse, you couldn't tell it what printer to use. Every print went to one printer down in the reindeer stables.Cue the testing cycle of "try running the report, ride the world's slowest elevator to the basement, walk through the reindeer stables, wait for the printer to finish running off its pages of error messages, drag the ream of paper back upstairs and try to match it to the code." Through this process, Renee learned a few important things. First, no matter how Christmas-y and magical reindeer were in spirit, in odor they were more Halloween Horror. Second, for some reason, there were SQL errors showing up in the stack traces. But everything was supposed to be webservices wrapped on mainframes, so why were there database calls?Renee went back to Merlin's binders, and with the help of what little High Enochian she could remember from high school, Renee started to piece together what was happening.Circa 2004, against Merlin's protests, there had been a project code-named RED. The goal of RED was to "upgrade" NNOSE to a full J2EE system with an Oracle backend. If Renee was reading the Enochian correctly, Merlin had banished the elf responsible for contracting the vendor to the Astral Plane, where they were surely captured by Githyanki."Well, that's got to be a violation of HR policies," Renee noted to herself.The project never completed, but progressed to the point where the Oracle backend had been running in parallel with NNOSE ever since. That explained the SQL errors. The VB.NET app had functionality added to talk to the "upgraded" RED system. At some point in its history, the VB.NET app had been pointed to that backend, and had been querying it instead of the mainframe. Sure enough, when Renee logged into Oracle directly, most commands returned errors as something in this more-or-less unmaintained and unpatched Oracle instance was completely FUBAR.Renee poked at the VB.NET app until she figured out how to resurrect the webservice-based data access layer. One more olfactory offense later, and Renee was holding a TPS report. Off it went to Santa, and off she went to give an after action to Hermie."Great work! You've saved Christmas!" Hermie said. "Shame about Merlin, though.""What about Merlin?""Oh, the whole banishing poor Roger to be soulsucked on the Astral Plane. That is absolutely a firing offense, and we're going to have to let Merlin go. Don't worry, though. After this, I'm confident that you can fill in as our new NNOSE and LUMPS expert. You can think of it like a promotion, and maybe in a few years, it'll involve a salary increase!" 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Part of Python’s appeal is its rich class library. The old XKCD about import antigravity sometimes doesn’t feel that far off. Combined with a few third-party libraries, like NumPy, you can do a lot with very little code.Of course, that feels a bit like magic. As Python gurus like to say, “Explicit is better than implicit”. One of Mark’s co-workers took this perhaps a bit too far, when they started adding this import to every file:

A long time ago in my "C" programming days, I learned that when you code up anything that depends on any sort of external data, be it a file, database or socket, you should be paranoid and do it defensively. After all, you can't control those things and there's no guarantee that they will always work the way you hope. Sometimes you care about every possible error code; sometimes just success or failure. The point is to check the result of what you tried to do. Fast forward through several years of C++ and ten years into Java, and our boss calls us into the office.

Tis the season to think of trees.Our Anonymous submitter has a program with a tree in it, and it’s a relatively big one: 7 levels deep, with 200,000 leaf nodes. Oh, and it’s managed in client-side JavaScript. In other words, it’s the sort of thing you really want to make sure you’re accessing efficiently.Since it’s a tree, and since in this case, all the nodes are doubly linked (each child contains a reference to its parent), it’s easy to get from any one node to any other, with a minimal number of steps. There’s never a good reason to traverse the entire tree.Which is why Anonymous facepalmed when they found this code:

You know the story. A report is spitting out the wrong dates. Someone gets called in to investigate what’s wrong. After digging through piles of deeply nested SQL queries and views and trying to track down the problem, it turns out someone wrote their own date handling code which is wrong.Darin P found the code this time.

As programmers, we all need to fix bugs. As experienced programmers, we recognize that sometimes, the ability to fix one bug depends upon first fixing another bug. Managers, on the other hand, don't always get that simple concept.At the beginning of my career, I worked for Initrode where I wrote software to run a test-station that diagnosed assorted electronic components of jet fighters. Initrode acted as a government-supplier of the test station to another government contractor (LUserCorp) that used the station to write the test sequences to diagnose electrical faults. If the test station hardware malfunctioned, or there were bugs in the software that made the electronics tests fail to work properly, then LUserCorp could use that as an excuse for time and cost overruns. If that happened, then the government would penalize Initrode to recoup those costs.Over time and several releases of the hardware and software, a series of hardware faults and software bugs managed to creep into the system. Since LUserCorp was running behind schedule anyway, they decided that they'd use this as an excuse to hit the government for more time and money. Naturally, the brass at Initrode fought back because they didn't want to take the financial hit.After lots of political back-and-forth, an official prioritized bug list was created, and it was mandated by LUserCorp that the bugs had to be fixed in the order in which they appeared on the list.To this end, me and another junior developer were sent to LUserCorp to act as a Tiger Team. Basically, this means we are in a locked room, alone with the test station. The LUserCorp people were not allowed in the room with us. We brought the source code on our own disk pack which one of us had to be with at all times. This meant that if we went to lunch, or both had to hit the restroom at the same time, we had to power everything down and take the disk with us.The list of bugs to be addressed was provided to us only after we were on site. The first and most important bug on the list was something I had coded that had an off-by-one error in a nested loop, that only appeared at the end of the third iteration of the outer loop. Since each inner loop processed and printed the 6-line result of each of 4K tests (to a very slow thermal printer), it took 6 hours to print out 3*4K*6 => 72K lines of test results.Our software also had stop-at-test-n functionality. We noticed that bug number 2 on the list was in the stop-at-test-n functionality (it prevented that feature from being used).In the ideal case where all other functions were working, we'd do:

Brian B stumbled across a bit of code to generate UUIDs. Seeing that tag-line, I was worried that they invented their own UUID generator. The good news, is that they just use java.util.UUID. The bad news is that they don’t understand how if statements work.

Asynchronous programming is hard. Because it’s so difficult, developers are constantly trying to find ways to make it simpler, whether it’s promises or callbacks, or the async/await pattern. It gets more difficult when you need to deal with handling exceptions- when a task fails, trying to recover from that failure in a separate thread is an extra special challenge.Which brings us to Betty’s co-worker. Using C#’s Task objects, which tie into the async/await pattern, they wanted to simply ignore any exceptions thrown by one of those tasks. That’s your first WTF, of course. Their approach, however, is a larger one:

It's easy to use dictionaries/maps to solve the wrong kinds of problems, but deep down, what's more elegant than a simple hashed map structure? If you have the key, fetching the associated value back out happens in constant time, regardless of the size of the map. The same is true for inserting. In fact, hash maps only become inefficient when you start searching them.Concetta recently started a new job. Once upon a time, a developer at the office noticed that the user-facing admin pages for their product were garbage. They whipped up their own internal version, which let them accomplish tasks that were difficult, time-consuming, or downright impossible to do in the "official" front end. Time passed, someone noticed, "Hey, this is better than our actual product!", and suddenly the C# code that just lived in one folder on one developer's machine was getting refactored and cleaned up into an application they could release to the public.Concetta wasn't surprised to see that the code wasn't exactly great. She wasn't surprised that it constantly threw exceptions any time you tried to change anything. But she was surprised by this:

The line between objects and maps can sometimes get a little blurry. In languages like JavaScript, there’s really no difference between the two. In Python, the deep internals of your classes are implemented essentially as dicts, though there are ways around that behavior.In a language like C#, however, you’ve got types, you’ve got property definitions. This can offer a lot of advantages. When you layer on features like reflection, you can inspect your objects. Combine all this, and it means that if you want to serialize a data object to XML, you can usually do it in a way that’s both typesafe and generally doesn’t require much code on your part. A handful of annotations and a few method calls, and boom- any object gets serialized.Unless you work at Kara’s office, of course. When they have an object that requires serialization, they must inherit from SerializableObjectBase.

Hiring people you know is a double-edged sword. You already have an established relationship, and shared background, and an understanding of how they think and act. You’re helping a friend out, which always feels good. Then again, good friends don’t always make good co-workers, and if you limit your hiring pool to “people I know” you’re not always going to find the best people.Becky’s boss, Chaz, tends to favor his golf buddies. One of those golf buddies got hired, developed for a few months, then just gradually ghosted on the job. They never quite quit or got fired, they just started coming in less and less until they stopped coming in at all.Chaz passed the code over to Becky to fix. By “passed”, that is to say, he emailed her a zip file of the source, which was the only working copy of the code. There was no documentation, no source control, certainly no tests, and no description of what the program was actually supposed to do. “Just fix the bugs,” Chaz said.

Brian recently started a new job. That means spending some time poking around the code base, trying to get a grasp on what the software does, how it does it, and maybe a little bit of why. Since the users have some complaints about performance, that's where Brian is mostly focusing his attention.The "good" news for Brian is that the his predecessors were "geniuses", and they came up with a lot of "clever" solutions to common problems. The actually good news is that they've long since moved on to other jobs, and Brian will have a free hand in trying to revise their "cleverness".

Jay J had been helping a friend with the job hunt. As an experienced developer, with a strong network, Jay had a sense of who was hiring and what jobs were promising. One of his connections turned up a lead at Initech. Jay pointed his friend in that direction, and wished for the best."They won't let me apply," the friend explained when Jay asked how things were going. "Here, try it. These are my details. This is the link for the web application. Fill in the form and see what happens."The first thing Jay noticed when pulling up the form was that it was clearly built from a toolkit of reusable widgets. The way validations appeared, the way the page laid out- this was a bolt-together HR application built out of some enterprise solution. Nothing inherently wrong with that approach- it can save time by using reusable components.The trick, of course, is that reusable components have to be used correctly.Jay filled in the from. Name. Address. Birth date. Attach a resume. Re-enter 90% of the information that's already on the resume. Click submit.

Buford was a contract developer working at a mid-sized financial firm. He had just wrapped up a lengthy project and was looking for something new to sink his teeth into. Tanner, the manager in his area, tasked him with moving their implementation of Jenkins into "this great new thing they call The Cloud."Tanner recently returned from a conference with a bunch of swag from a company called PuffyCloud. They claimed to have the easiest cloud-based implementation of Jenkins in the business. "It's pretty much just a copy-paste job according to this whitepaper they gave me. Take a look, create some user stories, and have it done by the end of the next sprint," Tanner instructed.Buford opened up the whitepaper and soon found that PuffyCloud was certainly full of puffery. They boasted about how their approach was "production-ready for an enterprise environment" and "dozens of organizations have revolutionized their systems with PuffyCloud and the magic of our simple Docker Compose code."After getting through several pages of drivel, Buford already had a better, cheaper way in mind. He returned to Tanner's office to explain, "Look, I don't know what these PuffyCloud guys will charge, but I'm certain I can get the same result for only the cost of my time. I can make my own Docker script to install everything on a cloud-based server that we control without a costly middle-man license from them."Tanner furrowed his brow before responding, "Bah! Doing this yourself will take way too long. I guess you didn't hear me the first time I explained this PuffyCloud thing. Copy. And. Paste. Do that and you'll finish easily with time to spare in the sprint.Buford went back to reading the mind-numbing whitepaper since Tanner was clearly insistent on going with PuffyCloud. Ten minutes later, he finally got to the "production-ready for an enterprise environment" script:

In early 2002, Bert landed a job at Initech, which released its own protocol analyzer tool. Technically, they released a whole slate of protocol analyzers, data loggers, analytics tools, with overlapping features and business cases. Their product catalog had grown over the years, and was a bit of a thicket.The team Bert joined was a decent mix of talent. Some, like him, were new to the industry. There were some more experienced devs, who knew the product and the low-level internals their software needed to navigate. And then there was Herb.Herb was every stereotype of the 70s era hacker, aged up into the 00s. He had a collection of buckling spring keyboards, thought 64k of RAM was an incomprehensibly large amount, could code Assembly faster than most of the rest of the team could do C, and he knew every line of code in every product, and knew exactly what it did and why it was there.Jack, the team's project lead, was Herb's polar opposite. Young, with a shiny new MBA, a focus on the kind of networking skills that didn't involve CAT5 cable, and absolutely no useful knowledge about anything. "Our team exists to serve the business," Jack was fond of saying. "So whatever the business needs, we do. No. Matter. What."The business decided that their complicated product catalog was hurting their sales. Customers were confused about which product to purchase, some tools were receiving barely any updates, and there really wasn't enough opportunity to "upsell" additional functionality, since every product already had more functionality than most users needed. As part of this process, two older protocol analyzers and an unrelated data logger would be merged into a single product.Well, the business needed something, and Jack was confident that his team would make it happen. Since this was "just" merging software together, it couldn't possibly be all that much work. It was nothing more than some mechanical repackaging, a little tweaking, and the biggest part of the work was probably updating the help files. Jack didn't need to talk to anyone on the development team to decide how they were going to serve the business.The new product, Initech's INILYZER, would release in four months. Since it was replacing three existing products, those could be put into end-of-life. Since the INILYZER was definitely coming out in four months, they could be EOLed in four months as well.Jack's next task was to communicate this to his team at the project kickoff meeting. Jack loved to turn project kickoffs into his own personal motivational speaking exercise, because "That's how you build team morale!" So the kickoff meeting launched with dramatic intro music (provided by a tiny CD player in the corner), a rousing speech, and then the pièce de résistance: freshly made t-shirts for the whole team, emblazoned with: "The INILYZER: August 30, 2002"August 30th was Jack's predetermined release date."Well," Jack said, gleefully doing his best impression of a stadium t-shirt cannon, "does anyone have any questions before we go out and totally crush this awesome project?"Most of the team cringed, except for Herb. He held up a shirt and pointed at the date. "Yeah. Where'd this timeline come from?""It's driven by business need," Jack said."Okay, but you're never going to hit this date.""Um, Herb, we're doers at this company. We have a date, and we are going to hit that date."This meeting was on a Friday. Over the weekend, Bert and the rest of the team chucked their t-shirts into the rag pile and basically forgot about them. But not Herb. On Monday, Herb walked into the office, proudly wearing his project shirt.With a small modification, scratched in with red marker. It now read: "The INILYZER: August 30, 20023".Jack didn't notice it until about 10AM, and when he did, it prompted a meltdown. He started screaming at Herb about insubordination, respect, and team spirit. "I want that shirt off, right now! Or you're fired!""I didn't bring anything to change into," Herb said.Jack stomped off, fuming.The project continued. August 30th came and went. Summer turned to autumn, autumn into winter. Six months after officially EOLing major products without having a replacement ready to go, there was a management purge throughout the company. Jack got fired, and there was much rejoicing.Jack's replacement was Emma. It didn't take long for Emma to get a read for the new team, understand the source of the mess, and start working to get it as cleaned up as it could. When upper management started looking at Bert's team as another possible cut, it was Emma who made sure they understood that they were doing the best they could with an unrealistic timeline. Nobody else from the team got fired.August 30th, 2003, the Initech INILYZER shipped. Emma, having heard about the now infamous t-shirt story, had a small plaque made up to celebrate Herb's accuracy.Of course, with the unrealistic timeline, unrealistic goals, and management problems, the INILYZER shipped as a pile of barely usable crap. As it turns out, pretty much no customer wanted those products glued together in any way, making the whole effort pointless. It was a technical and commercial flop. The project to replace it started the very same day as its release.Emma was the PM. Unlike her predecessor, she talked with the developers, especially the most experienced team members, to figure out what the timeline and scope actually were. The project kickoff involved no t-shirts. 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Circa 2009, Marylou took a position at an e-commerce firm. It was a small company, which had done its startup phase right in the midst of the DotCom Crash, but somehow made it out the other end with a steady revenue stream.That itself turned out to be a problem, as once you turn a profit, investors stop investing. The company founders spent the next few years looking for investment to expand, and when they finally got it, they went on a hiring spree. That's where Marylou came in.The company had been founded by developers, but over the years, they took on more and more leadership responsibilities, and handed off the development responsibilities to Joel. Joel was Marylou's new boss."So, the first thing you'll want to do is install our CVS client and our Eclipse plugin," Joel explained, working with Marylou to get her development box set up.Marylou reached for the Eclipse plugin manager and started searching for a CVS plugin. "No, no," Joel said. "Our CVS client and plugin. I forked CVS so we can use a customized version."Marylou paused, waiting for the punchline. Joel took this silence as an opportunity to steal the mouse and start clicking around on her machine for her. "Y'see, we needed a system that let us easily stage releases before going into production. So I built one.""Um… most organizations use a separate tool that sits on top of source control for that.""Yeah, but this way, it's integrated!"Once Marylou was set up, and had the code pulled to her machine, Joel started showing off some of his "clever" solutions. "Like, I wrote this using recursion!"

Rob M caught a ticket for a bug in a C# application. Specifically, when the user picked an item off a menu, that item wouldn't get highlighted, thus defeating the purpose of the menu. Strangely, the code hadn't been touched since its first commit, back in 2015.

Setting aside cross-browser quirks, CSS is a fiendishly complicated specification. There’s a lot to it. From styling rules and how they interact with the DOM hierarchy, to the complexities of using selectors to navigate the DOM- it’s a complex tool that is also very powerful. I mean, it’s Turing complete.Shiv works with a self-proclaimed “CSS Ninja”- yes, that was actually in their resume when they got hired. They were hired on the strength of their portfolio- it looked very nice. Unfortunately, the implementation left something to be desired.For example, imagine you had twenty elements on a page which needed to be styled the same. You might choose to apply a class attribute to them, and create a single styling rule for that entire class. But that’s not what a CSS ninja does.

Today's anonymous submitter has this to say about this code: "It works fine, it's just... clever."I'm not certain about the relative cleverness of this solution, myself.