by Mark Bowytz on (#4C2HP)
"Considering the format died out a decade ago, I think I'm going to remove this one from my list and pass on the pre-order," John C. writes.
The Daily WTF
| Link | http://thedailywtf.com/ |
| Feed | http://syndication.thedailywtf.com/TheDailyWtf |
| Updated | 2026-02-18 05:31 |
by Remy Porter on (#4C06A)
Since the dawn of software development, people have endlessly been searching for a way to modularize their applications efficiently. From the “do one thing and do it well (and also everything is text)†protocols of Unix-style command line tools, through to modern microservices, the key idea has always been to have simple, easy to understand components which interface in simple, easy to understand ways. Complex things are built from piles of small, tiny things.Matt W was working on one of those simple modules in a Big Complicated Thing. The Big Complicated Thing was an enterprise “do everything†tool, and like most enterprise tools, it was larger and more complicated than it needed to be. Also, everything talked to everything else in XML, the most enterprise of cross-component interfaces.Over the decades of continuous development, components had proliferated, interfaces had ball-of-mudded together, and seemingly arbitrary silos created boundaries where they didn’t make any sense. To wit, Matt needed to build a report out of the contents of some server-side session variables. Those session variables were populated by another component, which fetched the data from yet another component. Worse, many of those variables were optional, but despite using XML much of the data was stringly typed. Which meant, during testing, Matt saw this in a report:
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by Alex Papadimoulis on (#4BY8R)
A couple weeks back, I posted the Free Mug Day campaign: run through the quick BuildMaster tutorial, and I'll send you a free mug. Today, I have a slightly different offer: meet me at InedoCon (Portland, May 22/23) as a TDWTF delegate, and let's chat software over scotch!Why Portland? As part of the mug campaign, I asked everyone to share their feedback/comments/advice, and I got lots of suggestions on how we can improve the software itself. That was great, and then I saw this:
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by Remy Porter on (#4BXTG)
The realest of real WTFs, the reigning champion for all eternity is and forever will be Oracle. Today, we’re going to take a look at a little code in PL/SQL.PL/SQL is a weird language, a blend of SQL and, well, a Procedural Language, with a side of OO slapped on. The syntax does an excellent job giving you the feeling that it was designed in the 1970s, and each new feature or change to the language continues that tradition.The structure of any PL/SQL code unit is going to be built around blocks. Each block represents a self-contained namespace. The basic anatomy is:
by Remy Porter on (#4BVDN)
Providing authentication for your web-based APIs is both a challenging problem but also a largely solved problem. The hardest part is really just working your way through the various options, and from there it’s usually some variation on a drop-in component.Done properly, it’s also client-agnostic. I can access the service from my browser, I can access it from a thick client, I can access it from cURL. Done incorrectly, well, you get what happened to Amira.She was trying to pull some statistics from the backend, and couldn’t figure out how to authenticate. So she checked the front-end code to see how it authenticated:
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by Jane Bailey on (#4BS3E)
If you ask an engineer whether it's safe to cross a bridge, he'll happily walk you through how safe bridges are, how the mathematics work out, how far we've come in structural safety. You'll come away from the conversation feeling confident that no bridge will ever collapse anywhere on the face of the Earth. If you ask a software engineer about banks, however, you'll likely come away terrified, with a 50/50 chance you're now convinced to put all your money in bitcoin. Banks are notorious for bad software decisions—not so much because the decisions are worse, but because most people assume banks are more careful and security-minded.Today's submitter, Kato, worked at Inibank, where they used a commercial product called T24 as the core of their banking system. T24 is used by hundreds of banks worldwide. It's customizable for a wide range of banking solutions, and so like most large customizable suites, there are programmers that specialize in writing custom code for it and consultants that will hold your hand through major upgrades.Inibank brought in a consultant to take on a special project while their resources were busy. At the end of the business day, there is a Close Of Business process that has to be done to ensure all the money gets where it's going, all the appropriate outputs are recalculated, and all the relevant reports are run. In banks, this also changes the system's date to the next working day—which is why if you do online banking on a Sunday, none of it begins to process until Monday morning. The consultant was meant to create a new report that would run during the Close Of Business process, which would do extra processing if it were also the End of Month.Kato sat down with the new guy, showing him how they'd set up their end of day reports. "You see here, there's a global for the last working day, one for today, and one for the next working day. Those are YYMMDD, so they're easier to work with.""Right, right okay, gotcha. Gotcha. And what format is that?""... I don't know the standard off the top of my head, but it's year, month, day.""Right, right, okay. Cool. I'll get right to work, then."Kato walked away from the conversation with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, but he tried to ignore it. The consultant said he was all set up and ready. Surely he knew what he was doing, right? Kato put it out of his mind, and didn't worry about it again until it came time to review the code, and he found this gem:
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by Mark Bowytz on (#4BKJC)
Adam wrote, "I hear that NewFeature1 is a real, ahem, killer feature of these Wi-Fi drivers."
by Remy Porter on (#4BH5V)
George G was hired to do some UI work for a company which sold a suite of networking hardware. As networking hardware needs to be highly configurable, George was hired on to do “some minor tweaks†to the UI. “It’s just some sizing issues, fonts, the like. I’m sure you’ll do something to the stylesheets or whatever,†said the boss.The boss didn’t know what they were talking about. The UI for some of the products was a web based config tool. That was their consumer-grade products. Their professional grade products used the same Java program which was originally released 15 years earlier. There were no stylesheets. Instead, there was an ancient and wobbling pile of Java Swing UI code, maintained by a “master†who had Strong Opinionsâ„¢ about how that code should look.For example, dispatching a call to a method is indirection. Indirection is confusing. So inline those calls, especially if there's a conditional involved: inline all the “ifsâ€. Factory methods and other tools for constructing complex objects are confusing, so always inline your calls to constructors, and always pass as many parameters as you can, except for the times where you don’t do that, because why would we be consistent about anything?All of the developers on the project had to attend to the master’s wishes during code reviews, where the master gleefully unrefactored code “to make it more clear.â€Also, keep in mind that this UI started back in an era where “800x600†was a viable screen resolution, and in fact, that’s the resolution it was designed against. On a modern monitor, it’s painfully tiny, stuffed with tabs and icons and other UI widgets. Over the years, the UI code has been tweaked to handle edge cases: one customer had the UI zoom turned on, so now there were piles of conditionals to check if the UI needed to be re-laid out. Somebody got a HiDPI display, so again, a bunch of checks and custom code paths, all piled together.Speaking of layout, Swing was a prime case of Java taking object orientation to the extreme, so in addition to passing in widgets you want displayed, you also can supply a layout object which decides how to fill the frame. There was a whole library of them, but if you wanted a flexible layout that also handled screen scaling well, you had to use the most complicated one: Grid Bag. The Grid Bag, as the name implies, is a grid, but where the grid cells can be arbitrary sizes. You control this by adding constraints to the flow. It’s peak Java overcomplification, so even simple UIs tend to get convoluted, and with the “inline all the things†logic, you end up with code like this:
by Remy Porter on (#4BEQK)
Denae inherited some 90s-era GUI code. The original developers have long since gone away, and the source control history has vanished into oblivion. In the 90s, the Standard Template Library for C++ was still very new, so when Denae needs to debug things in this application, it means doing some code archaeology and picking through home-brewed implementations of common data structures.Denae’s most recent bug involved understanding why some UI elements weren’t updating properly. The basic logic the application used is that it maintained a List of GUI items which need to be repainted. So Denae dug into the the List implementation.
by Remy Porter on (#4BC8W)
You may remember Kara, who recently found some "interesting" serialization code. Now, this code happens to be responsible for sending commands to pieces of machine equipment.Low-level machine interfaces remain one of the domains where serial protocols rule. Serial communications use simple hardware and have minimal overhead, and something like RS232 has been in real-world use since the 60s. Sure, it's slow, sure it's not great with coping with noise, sure you have to jump through some hoops if you want a connection longer than 15m, but its failures are well understood.Nothing is so well understood that some developer can't make a mess of it.
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by Ellis Morning on (#4B9WP)
Many moons ago, when PCs came housed within heavy cases of metal and plastic, Matt Q. and his colleague were assigned to evaluate a software package for an upcoming sales venture. Unfortunately, he and the colleague worked in different offices within the same metro area. As this was an age bereft of effective online collaboration tools, Matt had to travel regularly to the other office, carrying his PC with him. Each time, that meant unscrewing and unhooking the customary 473 peripheral cables from the back of the box, schlepping it through the halls and down the stairs, and catching the bus to reach the other office, where he got to do all those things again in reverse order. When poor scheduling forced the pair to work on the weekend, they hauled their work boxes between apartments as well.As their work proceeded, Matt reached the limits of what his 20 MB hard drive could offer. From his home office, Matt filed a support ticket with IT. The technician assigned to his ticket—Gary—arrived at Matt's cubicle some time later, brandishing a new hard drive and a screwdriver. Gary shooed Matt away for more coffee to better focus on his patient. One minor surgery later, Matt's PC was back up and running with a bigger hard drive.One day ahead of the project deadline, Matt was nearly done with his share of the work. He just had a few tweaks to make to his reports before copying them to the floppy disks needed by the sales team. Having hooked his PC back up within his cubicle, he switched it on—only to be greeted with a literal bang. The PC was dead and would not start.After a panicked call to IT, Gary eventually reappeared at his desk with a screwdriver. Upon cracking open the PC case, he immediately cried, "Wait a minute! Have you been carting this PC around?"Matt frowned. "Er, yes. Is that a problem?""I'll say! You weren't supposed to do that!" Gary scolded. "The hard drive's come loose and shorted out the workings!"Matt darted over to Gary's side so he could see the computer's innards for himself. It didn't take long at all to notice that the new hard drive had been "secured" into place using Scotch tape."Hang on! I daresay you weren't supposed to do that!" Matt pointed to the offending tape. "Shall I check with your manager to be on the safe side?"Gary's face crumpled. "I don't have access to the proper mountings!""Then find someone who does!"Armed with his looming deadline and boss' approval, Matt escalated his support ticket even higher. It didn't take long at all for genuine mounting brackets to replace the tape. He never learned why IT techs were being deprived of necessary hardware; he assumed it was some fool's idea of a brilliant cost-cutting measure. He had to wonder how many desperate improvisations held their IT infrastructure together, and how much longer they would've gone unnoticed if it hadn't been for his PC-toting ways. [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.
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by Mark Bowytz on (#4B4CE)
Neil S. wrote, "MSN UK's reverse psychology marketing angle is pretty edgy."
by Remy Porter on (#4B1W4)
Ignoring current events, England and the rest of Europe have had a number of historical conflicts which have left a number of grudges littered across the landscape.Andro V lives in Norway, but is remotely collaborating with an English developer. That English developer wants their peers to know that Sweyn I and Thorkell the Tall’s invasions of southern England will never be forgotten.
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by Bobby T. Johnson on (#4AZ7A)
People like hot dogs until they see how it's made. Most people don't ask, because they don't want to know and keep eating hot dogs. In software, sometimes we have to ask. It's not just about solving problems, but because what scares some programmers is the knowledge that their car's software might be little more than the equivalent of driving duct-taped toothpicks down the highway at 70MPH. Our entire field is bad at what we do.Brett worked as a system analyst for a medical research institution, MedStitute. MedStitute used proprietary software for data storage and analysis, called MedTech. Doctors and researchers like MedTech's results, but Brett his co-worker Tyree- know how it's made.The software has no backend access, and all software development happens in a "click-to-program" GUI. The GUI looks like it was built from someone who learned to code by copy/pasting from 1990s era websites, watching ten minutes of Jurassic Park, and searching StackOverflow until something compiled. The "language" shows the same careful design philosophy. Every if must have an else. Some modules use booleans, some return an empty string to represent false values. Documentation is unclear about which situation is which. Essentially, every if statement becomes three statements.Brett needed to launch a new study. A study depends on some basic set of statistics and groups patients based on a randomized variable. Brett looked through the list of variables he could randomize on, and the one he wanted was missing. Brett assumed he made a mistake, and went back a few screens to check the name, copying it down for reference. He went back to the list of randomizable variables. It wasn't there. He looked closer at the list. He noticed that the list of randomized variables only included data from multiple-choice fields. The field he wanted to randomize on was based on a calculated field.Brett knew that Tyree had worked on another project that randomized on a calculated field, so he messaged Tyree on Slack. "How did you code this random variable? In Medtech it won't let you?""I'm on a conference call, let me call you afterward," Tyree wrote.A few minutes later, Tyree called Brett."What you have to do is start with two fields. Let's call it $variable_choice, that's a multiple choice question, and $variable_calced that's your calculated field. When you want to create a variable that randomly selects based on your calculated field, you start by telling Medtech that this random variable is based on $variable_choice. Then you delete $variable_choice, and then rename $variable_calced to be $variable_choice.""Wait, they allow you to do that, but don't allow you to randomize calculated fields any other way? And they don't check?""Hopefully, they don't decide to start checking before this project is over," Tyree said."This study is supposed to go on for ten years. This project succeeding comes down to them never treating this workaround as a bug?""It was the only solution I could find. Let me know if you need anything else?"Brett wasn't completely satisfied with the hack and went back to the documentation. He found a "better" solution: he could make a read-only multiple-choice field with only one choice, the value of the calculated field, as the default answer. Unfortunately, it was possible that the user would alter the list unintentionally by answering the multiple-choice question before the calculated field was evaluated.Ultimately, the only choice left to Brett was to take his lunch break, go to the cafeteria, and order two hot dogs. [Advertisement] Utilize BuildMaster to release your software with confidence, at the pace your business demands. Download today!
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by Remy Porter on (#4AWMB)
“We know that governmental data-systems aren’t generally considered ‘cutting edge’ or ‘well architected’, but we’ve brought together some top flight talent, and we’re building a RESTful architecture that guarantees your code gets nice, easy-to-consume JSON objects.â€That’s what Oralee B. was told when she was hired to work on it. The system owned pretty much the entirety of the municipal data management market, tracking birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates and pet licenses for nearly every city in the country. JSON is so simple, how can you screw it up?The same way most people seem to screw it up: reinventing key/value pairs in your key/value data format.
by Remy Porter on (#4AT54)
Mike inherited a data-driven application. Once upon a time, it started out pretty well architected. Yes, it was in PHP, but with good architecture, solid coding practices, and experienced developers, it was simple and easy to maintain.Time passed. The architects behind it left, new developers were hired, management changed over, and it gradually drifted into what you imagine when you hear "PHP app" in 2019.Mike's task was to start trying to clean up that mess, and that started all the way back in the database layer with some normalization. From there, it was the arduous task of going through the existing data access code and updating it to use the refined model objects.While there was a mix of "already uses a model" and "just a string" SQL statements in the code, there was a clear data-access layer, and almost all of the string-based queries actually used parameters. At least, that was true until Mike took a look at the "god" page of the application.You know how it is. Thinking through features and integrating them into your application is hard and requires coordinating with other team members. Slapping together a page which can generate any arbitrary SQL if you understand how to populate the drop-downs and check boxes correctly is "easy"- at least to start. And by the time it gets really hard, you've already created this:
by Mark Bowytz on (#4AMP7)
Michael P. wrote, "Only two minutes and a couple of blocks from my destination, Waze decided I should take a 2-hour, 80-mile detour."
by Remy Porter on (#4AJ75)
Sometimes, the best defense is a good offense. Other times, the best offense is a good defense. And if you’re not sure which is which, you’ll never be a true strategic mastermind.Tina’s co-worker understands that this is true for defensive programming. Always, always, always catch exceptions. That’s a good defense.
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by Alex Papadimoulis on (#4AG6R)
Long time, no mug! It's been an insanely long time since we've held a Free TDWTF Mug Day. So long that I'm sure most of you have forgotten the joy that is free mug day. Here's how it works:I've been pretty excited about BuildMaster 6.1, in part because it returns the product to my original vision of helping developers focus on writing great software instead of worrying about how to build, test, and deploy it from source code to production. Or, CI/CD as we'd call it today.I'd love to get your feedback on the release, and perhaps ideas on how I can work to improve the product. If you'd be willing to help me, I'll send you one of these beautiful, oversized TDWTF mugs, as modeled by Jawaad M:To get one, all you have to do is either download/install BuildMaster or spin up our pre-made virtual machine(AMI) image, then run through this quick configuration and fill out this form with your name, address, etc. It should take all of 15 minutes or so to complete.Everything's free, and there's no credit card needed, or anything like that. In fact, you can keep using BuildMaster for free if you'd like -- there's no server, application, or even user limit.This offer expires on March 31, 2019, and supply is limited to 250, so sign up soon! To get started, just follow this link and, in a few weeks time, you'll not only be more knowledgeable about BuildMaster, but you'll be enjoying beverages much more fashionably with these nice, hefty The Daily WTF mugs. [Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!
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by Remy Porter on (#4AFNF)
A lot of ink has been spilled talking about the perils and pitfalls of offshore development. Businesses love paying the wage arbitrage game, and shipping software development tasks to an outside vendor and paying half the wage they would for a dedicated employee.Of course, the key difference is the word “dedicatedâ€. You could have the most highly skilled offshore developer imaginable, but at the end of the day: they don’t care. They don’t care about you, or your business. They don’t care if their code is good or easy to maintain. They’re planning to copy-and-paste their way up the ranks of their business organization, and that means they want to get rotated off your contract onto whatever the next “plum†assignment is.Jules H worked for a company which went so far as to mandate that every project needed to leverage at least one offshore resource. In practice, this meant any project of scale would shuffle through half a dozen offshore developers during its lifetime. The regular employees ended up doing more work on the project than they would have if it had been developed in-house, because each specification had to be written out in utterly exhaustive detail, down to explaining what a checkbox was, because if you simply told them to add “a checkboxâ€, you’d get a dropdown or a text area instead.Jules got called in when someone noticed that the “save†functionality on one page had completely broken. Since the last change to that application had been a year ago, the feature hadn’t been working for a year.The page used a client-side MVC framework that also tied into a .NET MVC view, and due to the way the page had been implemented, all the client widgets treated everything as stringly typed (e.g., "true", not true), but all the server-side code expected JSON data with real types.The code which handled this conversion was attempting to access a field which didn’t exist, and that was the cause of the broken save functionality. That was easy for Jules to fix, but it also meant he had to take a look at the various techniques they used to handle this stringly-typed conversion.
by Remy Porter on (#4AD4V)
Inheritance is one of those object-oriented features whose importance is perhaps overstated. When I was first being introduced to OO, it was a lot of “code reuse!†and “polymorphism!†and “code reuse!†In practice, inheritance is usually a way to tightly couple two different classes and create more headaches and rework in the future.That’s why many OO languages favor interfaces, and why the classic Gang-of-Four patterns emphasize the importance of composition in many situations. And, because inheritance can make things complicated, most languages also require single parent inheritance.Most languages. C++, on the other hand, doesn’t. In C++, I could define a class Car, a class Truck, and then do this:
by Remy Porter on (#4AARD)
Parallel programming is hard. For all the advancements and tweaks we've made to our abstractions, for all the extra cores we've shoved into every CPU, deep down, software still carries the bias of the old uni-tasking model.Aleksei P works on a software package that is heavily parallel. As such, when interviewing, he talks to candidates about their experience with .NET's Task objects and the async/await keywords.One candidate practically exploded with enthusiasm when asked. "I've just finshed a pretty large text processing project that reads a text file in parallel!" They whipped out a laptop, pulled up the code, and proudly showed it to Aleksei (and gave Aleksei a link to their repo for bonus points).
by Mark Bowytz on (#4A573)
"If the screen is to be believed...This beer is going to rock!" wrote Tim F.
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by Charles Robinson on (#4A2NW)
Carl C spent some time in the late 1980's at a software firm that developed avionics and global positioning systems for military and civilian customers. In their employ, he frequently visited Schlockdeed Corp, a customer with a contract to develop a new generation of jet fighters for the US military. Due to the top secret nature of their work, security was a big deal there.Whenever Carl entered or left the facility, he had to pass through the security office to get clearance. They would thoroughly inspect his briefcase, jacket, lunchbox, and just about everything short of a full cavity search. Despite the meticulous nature of daily inspections at Schlockdeed, some of their "security measures" bordered on the absurd.During this era of Sneakernet-type transfers of information, it wasn't uncommon for a programmer to take a box full of floppy disks to and from work every day. Schlockdeed had a rather lax policy regarding disk transportation even though it would be a super easy way to steal their secrets. Subcontractors like Carl would be issued a "media pass" after passing the initial background check to work with Schlockdeed. It was a card that allowed them to carry any number of floppy disks in and out of the building without question.Carl's tenure was uneventful until he decided to bring his beloved HP-41CX calculator to the office. They were working on some complex algorithms and drawing up equations on a chalkboard was taking too long, so Carl hoped to speed up the process. During his morning inspection, Bill the security guy pulled out the HP-41CX and immediately had a concerned look come over his face.Bill reached for the radio on his shoulder, "Paulie, we're going to need you. We have a situation." Carl became extremely confused. Had the 41CX been known to be used in bombs? Was it April Fool's Day? "Sir, we need to send you to our CIO for secondary inspection. Right this way," Bill motioned.Carl's face flushed as he wondered what kind of trouble he was in, especially since "trouble" could quickly escalate to handcuffs and holding cells. He also wondered why a Chief Information Officer would be doing secondary security inspections. Bill led him to Paulie's office, which housed a portly man with a sweet 80's mustache. The nameplate on his desk identified him as the Calculator Inspection Officer."I'm gonna need to see yer adding machine there, buddy," Paulie said, holding his hand out. Bill placed the HP-41CX in his palm. He gave it a closer look and grunted, "I'll have to confiscate this from you. It's got internal memory in it, y'see, so you could potentially use it to sneak secrets out. You can have it back at the end of the day, but don't let me ever catch you bringing this here again!" Bill led a calculator-less Carl back to the main security office.On the way, Bill explained how programmable calculators were strictly forbidden in the facility. Paulie was in charge of enforcing this policy and took his job very seriously. If Carl wanted to bring a calculator, it would have to be a very basic model. Once Paulie approved it, an "AC" (Approved Calculator) sticker would be placed on the back to allow its entry. Feeling discouraged without his HP-41CX, Carl resigned himself to inhaling chalk dust for the rest of his time at Schlockdeed. At least he had a media pass, so he could still freely take floppy disks in and out of the facility. [Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!
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by Remy Porter on (#4A06C)
Let’s say you’ve got a project object in your code. A project might be opened, or it might be closed. In either case, you want to register an event handler to change the status- closed projects can be opened, opened projects can be closed. Now imagine you’re Antonio’s co-worker, Grenk.No, this time, it’s not a matter of streams. Today, it’s ternary abuse, of the “why is this even here†sort.
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by snoofle on (#49XRF)
We've all had cow-orker'swhocouldn'tdotheirjobs. Some people have even had the privilege of working with Paula.Jarad should be so lucky.He worked at Initech in a small development group, building a Windows client tool that customers used to interface with their server. One day, they decided to port the app from .NET to Java. The powers-that-be recommended a highly regarded Lead Java Developer, Kiesha, from Intelligenuity, to lead the project. "Don't worry," they said, "Intelligenuity only employs the most brillant programmers."At the first group stand up meeting of the project, their manager announced that they would use Eclipse for the Java project. Kiesha posited "I don't have Eclipse. Could someone please send it to me?" So Jarad sent her the link. At the next stand up, he followed up to ask if she had gotten Eclipse installed. She said "I was blocked because she had been unable to download it, so I waited for the next meeting to ask for help." Their manager jumped on her machine and solved her problem by clicking on the download link for her.Fast forward to the next meeting and she said that she was still unable to proceed because "Eclipse was having some problem with 'JDK' and could someone please send me that?" Jarad sent her that link too. Several days later at the next meeting, she said "Eclipse isn't working because it needs a 'jar' file, so could someone please send one to me?" And after that, "Could someone please send me sample code for doing classes because Eclipse kept saying NullPointerException".Finally the manager changed the meeting structure. They would continue their usual standups for the Windows client, but they would add a separate dedicated meeting with just Kiesha. Eventually, they found out that she and her husband were buddies with a highly placed C** executive and his wife. The separate meeting was to "guarantee that she's successful," which meant their manager was writing the code for her.One day, Kiesha told the manager that a customer was having a critical problem with the web portal, and that it was of the utmost importance that they have a meeting with the customer as soon as possible to help resolve the issue.Their manager set up a meeting with the customer, himself, Kiesha, Jarad, and the project manager to solve it once and for all. The day of the meeting, the customer was surprised at how many support people and managers showed up. The customer explained. "The, um… 'portal problem' is that we asked Kiesha for the URL of the web portal? This could have been an email." Sometimes, there is justice in this world, as Kiesha finally lost her job. [Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!
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by Remy Porter on (#49VAC)
Debugging code on embedded devices introduces additional challenges to tracking down what's going wrong, especially as in many cases, you can't even rely on any sort of println debugging. I've worked with a few devices which my only debugging output is 3 RGB LEDs.Serial devices, then, can be a godsend. For short runs, you can often just wire pin-to-pin, but for longer connections, you need some sort of serial transceiver chip. In most practical situations, the flow between two devices is CPU->UART->transceiver->cable->transceiver->UART->CPU. Apologies to the OSI model, yes, it's more complicated than this, but for our purposes, it's a useful illustration.Stephen was debugging a board where the chip supported four UARTs, but the board had two different transceivers on it, each responsible for two different UARTs. What was supposed to happen was that when data arrived via the serial bus, an interrupt would fire and react to the message. None of that was happening.It wasn't hard to find the method responsible for setting up the interrupts:
by Mark Bowytz on (#49NM7)
"I guess this is the price I pay for giving my Golden Retriever a unique (and secure) name," writes Robert N.
by Remy Porter on (#49K4C)
The beauty of structured exception handling is that it removes explicit conditional logic from your code. The conditions are still there, of course: a catch statement is essentially saying "if the exception type is X, then do this". But the strict syntax gives the compiler some freedom, and if you're using a language like Java, which favors checked exceptions (where methods declare what kinds of exceptions they might throw), there are all sorts of shortcuts the compiler might take to keep that efficient.But hey, that's all implicit, and if there's one thing we've learned, "explicit is better than implicit". How can we make exception handling explicit? Well, our Anonymous submitter inherited some Java code which does just that.
by Jane Bailey on (#49GH7)
There are a number of gotchas that trip up new programmers: the difference between declaring a variable and initializing it, the need for semicolons to terminate lines at times, and off-by-one errors, to name a few. All of us in the industry have met genius self-taught programmers who can put together extensive, well-architected applications in their sleep—but all of us have also met self-taught juniors who barely grasp the basics and think that's all they'll ever need. There's a reason degrees and formal training exist, after all.Today's story happened when Olaf was fresh out of university, working his first non-intern job as a "trainee programmer." The company aimed to improve government health care management: a noble goal, for those who have never had the dubious pleasure of interfacing with healthcare systems. However, it was founded by a doctor with just a smattering of PHP knowledge, all self-taught in his minimal spare time.Olaf came in with an eye to improving what was there using his knowledge of design patterns. PHP is a simple language to learn, but a hard one to master; much of the PHP software out there uses god objects and mingles code with layout, two big no-nos that are nevertheless taught in most online tutorials. Olaf began separating function from form, creating objects that could be reused to minimize the copy-pasting, and the like, happily bringing order to the chaos he'd been given.Which is how he found himself in the boss's office, on the wrong end of a dressing-down."The other programmers won't understand this!" the boss cried. "It's too complicated. Why are you changing it? It works, just leave it alone!"Disheartened, Olaf went back to work, checking out a clean copy of the master branch without his changes. Trying to ignore the bad practices, he began working on a bug in the accounting system, a bug marked "high priority" and "urgent" since it dealt with billing. Users would upload CSV files with information about what was spent, and the system would sum the values by category and create billing reports. However, there was a rounding error somewhere in the internals, leading to incorrect sums in a few important edge cases.Olaf had more training than his coworkers, but no training is exhaustive. He was able to quickly determine that this was a floating point mathematical error. Because decimals aren't represented exactly in binary, the math will be wrong in a few edge cases. He went looking for the right way to handle decimal values in PHP. However, unlike Node or C#, it's actually fairly difficult to include external libraries in PHP, as the language has no built-in support for package management. He was unable to figure out how to add a library that would do the math correctly. Since the software was only doing sums, he advocated for integer mathematics: read in the value, remove the decimal point (so that $10.50 would be represented as 1050), do the math, then add the decimal point back when displaying.One of the other junior devs loved the idea. The senior developer considered it—but the boss flat-out refused the suggestion. His take? "This isn't a floating-point error. This is because PHP is weakly typed, and it's trying to do summation as strings rather than numbers."(For those who are curious: PHP does not use the "+" operator to concatinate strings. It uses "." instead. "hello " . "world" results in "hello world".)The final solution the senior ended up implementing: separate the whole part from the fraction, so that our $10.50 charge becomes $10.00 and $0.50, then sum each portion separately.Olaf didn't wait around to see what would happen when they discovered that the bug still existed, since they were still treating the cents portion as a floating point number. He found a better job in a better language and never looked back. [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.
by Remy Porter on (#49E0X)
Coming from the US, I have a pretty simplistic model of how postcodes work. They’re either 5 or 9 digits, depending on how precise you’re being. I can validate that with a simple regular expression. There’s a lot of detail encoded in that number, including the central sorting facility and city or town I’m in, but I don’t usually care about those details. In any country with some sort of postcode system, while the pattern of the postcode may change, the complexity of it generally caps out pretty quickly. That’s sort of the point.Maybe Sam’s co-worker didn’t know what regexes were. Maybe they’d read an article talking about how regexes were expensive, and were worried about performance. Maybe they wrote this method as part of a college assignment and added it to their personal snippet library and never thought about it again. Maybe they just hated their co-workers and were planting landmines for them to stumble across. Regardless, this is how they verified a postcode within their locale.
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by Ellis Morning on (#49BZ2)
It was March 2016, and Ian was in need of a job. Fairly early into his search, he was lucky to find a tiny startup in need of someone with Python architecture and design skills. By "tiny," we mean that there were only three other developers working for Jack, the founder.Ian interviewed with Jack directly. After a technical test, he learned more about the company's pet project: a nearly-finished prototype of an iOS app. Once a user synced their phone with a wrist-worn heart rate monitor, the phone would play appropriate music for whatever the user was doing. It was primarily intended to help users reach a target heart rate while exercising. The app also used the phone's accelerometers to track the user's pace as they moved around, data that Jack claimed would be valuable for research into Parkinson's disease. He even had scientific papers from top universities to back up the claim. The prototype application, in its current state, wouldn't scale. Thus, Jack needed Ian to design a new backend system to store data and handle requests.Jack was friendly and personable, and his enthusiasm was contagious. Ian accepted on the spot, and started the next day. His office was cramped, but it was his. He got to work designing the requested backend.Two weeks passed. Then, early on a groggy Monday morning, Jack breathlessly pulled his dev team into a meeting room. The bright light beaming from his Powerpoint presentation drilled into everyone's retinas."I've been doing a lot of thinking," Jack prefaced. "We're a brand new startup. Nobody knows about us, right? We gotta do something to build up name recognition. So, here: we're gonna scrap the music part of the app, and focus solely on data collection."Ian stifled his instinctual What?! Not only were two weeks of work down the drain, but the data collection part of the app was an entirely optional feature at present.Jack flipped to a slide that showed the metrics he was now interested in tracking for each user. There were so many that the tiniest of fonts had been used to fit them all in. Ian squinted to read them."If you build a big enough haystack, a needle will appear!" Jack said. "We'll make the app free so it's a totally opt-in experience. The data we collect is the real prize."Investment capital was spent on posh downtown office space; for free app developers, only the very best would do. Jack also hired a second iOS developer, a data scientist, and an intern."But don't give the intern anything important to do," Jack told the full-timers.Once Ian settled into his new digs, he began architecting a new system that would somehow capture all the required data.Three months later, Jack threw it out. "No apps! We need a new direction!"Jack's new vision was a website where people would sit down and input what songs they listened to when sleeping, exercising, and performing other activities."People love to talk about themselves," Jack said. "They don't need to be paid to give us their data!"A frontend dev was hired to build the website. Soon after it went live, Jack bragged to investors that the website had hit 1 million unique visitors. In reality, the site had handled around 300 submissions, half of which had come from a single person.Three months later, guess what happened? Jack scrapped the faltering website in favor of a Slack bot that would respond to "Play ${song} by ${artist}" by looking it up on Spotify and providing a link. The Spotify widget would play a 30-second preview, or—if the user were logged in with a Spotify Premium account—play the whole song."That's it? How's that going to make any money?" By this point, the developers were no longer holding back their objections."We'll charge a subscription fee," Jack answered, undaunted."For a chat bot?" Ian challenged. "You already need Spotify Premium for this thing to fully work. If we want people to pay more money on top of that, we have to provide more features!""That's something we can figure out later," Jack said.Jack had the intern develop the company's new flagship product, going against the wishes of Jack from six months earlier. The intern gave it his best shot, but soon had to return to school; the unfinished code was unceremoniously tossed into the frontend developer's lap. With help from one of the iOS developers, he finished it off. And what was Ian up to? Setting up monitoring dashboards and logging at Jack's insistence that they'd attract enough users to justify it.Three more months passed. A number of "features" were added, such as the bot nagging users in the Slack channel to use it. As this behavior violated the Slack TOS, they were prevented from putting their app in the app store; Jack had to hand out links to a manual install to interested parties. The product was first given to 50 "super-friendly" companies Jack knew personally, of which only a handful installed it and even fewer kept using it after the first day. Jack then extended his offering to 300 "friendly" companies, with similar results.Ian's breaking point came when Jack insisted he pull overtime, even though there was no way he could help the other developers with their tasks. Nevertheless, Jack insisted Ian stay late with them to "show solidarity." Finally at his wit's end, Ian put in his two weeks. His final day coincided with the general release of the Slack bot, during which he watched a lot of very flat lines on dashboards. When he left the posh office for the last time, the startup still had yet to earn its first cent.Fortunately, Jack had a plan. After Ian left, he scrapped everything to start on fresh on a new product. No, it wouldn't make any money, but they needed name recognition first. [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.
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by Mark Bowytz on (#496HR)
"Google notified me that it needs help from a human and then displayed me this image," Jeff K. wrote, "I think I may need some help too."
by Remy Porter on (#4941Z)
“We’re a dynamic, multi-paradigm organization, and we do most of our new development in a blend of Ruby and Go. We’re not the kind of company that is dogmatic about tools though, we just want to deliver the best product for our customers.â€That’s what Delphia was told in the interview. She didn’t quite grasp why they were mixing those two techs in the first place, but the interview went well, and she took the job. It was then that she discovered that everything she’d been told was technically true.The company had just finished a sprint where they tried to pivot and reimplement their 15 year old codebase in Rails and Go. At the same time. It was difficult to tell from the code if this were a case where they did both together, or they were parallel projects, or frankly, if there was any coordination between either of them. That was their new development.The company didn’t do much new development, though. The core of the company’s business was a 7,500 line PHP file which contained a single form. It depends on includes from dozens of other files, some of which depend on functions defined in the main PHP file, and thus can’t be used in any other context but that include. It’s less spaghetti code or even a big ball of mud, and more a career killing meteorite.But it makes more money for the company in a day than Delphia can rightly count.One function that Delphia kept seeing invoked a bunch was yesorno. It was used almost everywhere, but she had never seen the definition. So, curious, she went digging. And digging. And digging. Someplace around the fifteenth or thirtieth include file she read through, she found it.
by Remy Porter on (#491GE)
“Um… can you come take a look at something for me?â€Pat looked up from happily hacking away at some new features to see Milton hovering at the edge of the cubicle.“I think I messed up,†Milton added.One of their company’s main internal systems was a data processing pipeline. “Pipeline†might be a bit generous, as in practice, it was actually a webwork of shell scripts and Python that pulled data in from files, did “stuff†to that data, and dropped the results into other files, which could then be read in by different scripts. In actual use, this usually meant people grabbed the latest version of the scripts from source control, modified and tweaked how they executed to answer one specific data-related question, and if that particular process seemed like it might have value, they’d clean the code up a bit and then try and merge it back up into source control. Otherwise, if they didn’t think they’d need it again, they’d just reset back to HEAD.Some folks, though, like Milton, mostly kept their own copy of all the scripts. Or in Milton’s case, multiple copies. Milton knew the data processing pipeline better than anyone, but the vast majority of that knowledge was locked up in his personal scripting library.“I was thinking I should probably try and contribute changes back upstream,†Milton said. “So, like, I’ve got a script that’s called by a script, which is called by a script, and it depends on having a bunch of shell variables created, like $SETUP_DIR.â€Pat nodded along.“So I wanted to refactor that into an argument, so other people could use it. And I did… but I forgot to change the calling scripts to pass the argument before I tried to test it.â€Specifically, Milton’s script had a line like this:
by Remy Porter on (#48YXJ)
Rita caught a weird bug. It was weird, in part, because there hadn’t been any code changes in their label printing application for ages. Yet, there was a sudden new bug. Labels were printing with what was obviously unicode garbage. Interestingly, the application definitely supported unicode- there had been a huge effort a few years back to move the C++ code from chars to wchars.Rita started debugging, and confirmed that when the label text was populated, memory stored correct values. By the time the data was printed, it no longer did. Obviously, there was something wrong with memory management- something was touching the end of the string and throwing off the output. That was an easy enough bug to make in C++, but tracing through 7,000 lines of label printing code to figure out where things got thrown off was more of a chore, especially with the… “friendly†variable naming convention the original developer had used.
by Remy Porter on (#48WET)
Printer jams are an unavoidable circumstance. Paper might not seem sticky, but static electricity and humidity can to horrible things, and all the protections in the world can't stop them. Printers are also objectively terrible, and always have been.Years ago, when Coyne T was a fresh-faced youth, he supported an aging COBOL-based warehouse system. Their reports went to a noisy continuous feed line printer. The printer was a finicky beast, and no matter what sacrifices were made before printing, it had a tendency to devour pages, or have the gears slip and misprint lines. Because the report data came straight from a COBOL job, there was no cached output to reprint- the entire reporting process would need to be re-run every time the printer got angry.About thirty pages of a report got chewed up a few days after Coyne joined the team. As the new kid, re-running the report fell to him. "But, before you go and re-run the report," the team lead, Herschel, said, "there's a few things you should know."Herschel laid out the key facts. The report generating program didn't just generate the report. It also could clear the monthly totals and update the day's inventory as part of running the report. Doing either of those in the middle of the day was absolutely wrong, and would create a lot of manual work to fix it. Even worse, doing both of those during the same run would stomp all over the data files and absolutely corrupt the entire mainframe."Fortunately, I added two flags- CLEAR-SWITCH and UPDATE-SWITCH. Just make sure they're both set to 'N', and you should be fine."Coyne checked and double checked the instructions, ensured that the flags were definitely set to 'N', and then ran the report.After the mainframe team had restored from backup and recovered as much of the data that they could (losing only the past three days worth of inventory), Coyne was called out on the carpet to explain how he'd destroyed the database. Despite being a newbie, Coyne had been cautious from the start, and reviewed the instructions which Herschel had given him, as well as how he'd verified that he'd followed the instructions. But Coyne had also gone the extra step, to look up the code block which checked those flags. He came to the meeting prepared.
by Mark Bowytz on (#48Q63)
"I was considering this recorder for my son, but I think 120W might be a bit over the top," writes Peter B.
by Remy Porter on (#48MR1)
“So, we have a problem. A… a big one.â€Andrea C worked for an insurance company. In terms of software development, a “problem†meant she’d misfiled one of her TPS coversheets or something like that. A big problem meant she’d accidentally checked in code that contained a comment with some profanity in it.“It’s actually, well, it’s actually huge,†her boss continued.She’d never had a “huge†problem before.Someone had discovered that, if they knew a customer’s policy number and were currently logged in- they could see that customer’s policy. It didn’t have to be their policy. Any policy, so long as they had a valid login and the policy number.That was pretty huge. Andrea hadn’t gotten too deep into that section of the application before, but the original developer had moved on, so it was time for her to dig in. She pulled up the JSP code which served the page.
by Remy Porter on (#48JBD)
Carl works in research, and like most research organizations, half their code is carelessly glued together GUI tools, command line interfaces, and shell scripts. The other half, the half which does the real work, is Fortran. Sure, the code was written forty years ago, but the laws of physics haven’t changed, so it’s still good and it’s still fast.Carl usually doesn’t have to touch the Fortran half. Instead, he usually looks at the other bit. Most things are run from shell scripts, and most of the work of the shell scripts is getting environment variables configured so that they Fotran code can actually run its model without having a heart attack.So, for example, one of those environment variables is WORKINGDIR. WORKINGDIR holds a /very/long/path/to/a/deeply/nested/folder/someplace The Fortran model code also needs to know the location of the SYSDIR, which is always exactly two levels up from WORKINGDIR. No, the Fortran code can’t figure this out on its own, it’s too busy doing calculus. The shell script needs to figure it out.The shell script which calculates it throws in a little wrinkle though: # calculate dir 2 levels up (Program doesn't allow .. in pathnames). So, no $WORKINGDIR/../.. here.There are a number of ways one could solve this problem. The wrong way to solve this problem is this ksh script…
by Remy Porter on (#48FWX)
I mentally think of the early 2000s as "the XML Age". XML was everywhere. Everyone wanted to put XML into their applications. Java was the XML king, using XML for everything. People were starting to ask themselves, "do we need the big expensive RDBMS, when we can just use XML instead?"In other words, just like JSON today, but worse. Tomislav A inherited one such database- a clunky pile of XML documents with only the vaguest hint of a schema to them, and a mix of valuable, useful data, and a mountain of crap. With the assumption that all data validation was happening in the application layer, the database was mostly "garbage in, garbage sits there forever and can never be deleted because it might be important".Tomislav's job was to filter out the garbage, find the actually useful information, and move it into a real datastore. There were loads of problems and inconsistencies in the data, but with a little Python in his toolkit, Tomislav could mostly handle those.For example, dates. Dates were stored in the XML as just text strings, because why would you use a structured document format to represent structured data? Since they were just strings, and since there was no data validation/sanitization in the application layer, there was no system to the strings. "31-DEC-2002" sat next to "12/31/2002" and "31/12/2002". With some help from dateutil.parser, Tomislav could handle most of those glitches without difficulty.Until, when importing a date, he got the error: ValueError: year 39002 is out of range.One of the dates in the document was just that- 39002. Knowing that there was no validation, Tomislav was ready to dismiss it as just corrupt data, but not before taking a stab at it. Was it the number of days, or maybe weeks since the Unix Epoch?
by Remy Porter on (#48DJ3)
Alex L works for a company with a bunch of data warehousing tools. One of the primary drivers for new features is adding bits which make the sales demos shinier, or in marketing speak, "delivers a value add for a prospective customer".One of those "shinies" was a lightweight server which would gather stats from the data warehousing engine and provide a dashboard with those stats, and notifications about them. Prospective customers really love it when the machine goes "bing" and shows them an interesting notification.As the notifications were becoming a bigger feature, the system needed a way to remember notification configuration between sessions, and that meant there needed to be a better persistence layer.To add the feature, Alex started by looking at the existing tests for the notification system.
by Mark Bowytz on (#487T1)
"It doesn't impact me, but just wondering...which one would I pick if my spouse was named Elisabeth?" wrote Jon T.
by Remy Porter on (#485BA)
Management went out and hired a Highly Paid Consultant to build some custom extensions for Service Now, a SaaS tool for IT operations management. HPC did their work, turned over the product, and vanished the instant the last check cleared. Matt was the blessed developer who was tasked with dealing with any bugs or feature requests.Everything was fine for a few days, until the thirthieth of January. One of the end users attempted to set the “Due Date†for a hardware order to 03-FEB–2019. This failed, because "Start date cannot be in the past".Now, at the time of this writing, Feburary 3rd, 2019 is not yet in the past, so Matt dug in to investigate.
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by snoofle on (#482PB)
We've all been inflicted with completely overdesigned overly generalized systems created by architects managers who didn't know how to scope things, or when to stop.We've all encountered premature optimization, and the subtle horrors that can spawn therefrom.For that matter, we've all inherited code that was written by individuals cow-orkers who didn't understand that this is not good variable naming policy.Jay's boss was a self-taught programmer from way back in the day and learned early on to write code that would conserve both memory and CPU compilation cycles for underpowered computers.He was assigned to work on such a program written by his boss. It quickly became apparent that when it came to variable names, let's just say that his boss was one of those people who believed that usefully descriptive variable names took so much longer to compile that he preemptively chose not to use them, or comments, in order to expedite compiling. Further, he made everything global to save the cost of pushing/popping variables to/from the stack. He even had a convention for naming his variables. Integers were named I1, I2, I3..., strings were named S1, S2, S3..., booleans were named F1, F2, F3...Thus, his programs were filled with intuitively self-explanatory statements like I23 = J4 + K17. Jay studied the program files for some time and had absolutely no clue as to what it was supposed to do, let alone how.He decided that the only sane thing that could be done was to figure out what each of those variables represented and rename it to something appropriate. For example, he figured out that S4 was customer name, and then went through the program and replaced every instance of S4 with customer_name. Rinse and repeat for every variable declaration. He spent countless hours at this and thought that he was finally making sense of the program, when he came to a line that, after variable renaming, now said: account_balance = account_balance - zip_code.Clearly, that seemed wrong. Okay, he must have made a mistake somewhere, so he went back and checked what made him think that those variables were account balance and zip code. Unfortunately, that's exactly what they represented... at the top of the program.To his chagrin, Jay soon realized that his boss, to save memory, had re-used variables for totally different purposes at different places in the program. The variable that contained zip code at the top contained item cost further down, and account balance elsewhere. The meaning of each variable changed not only by code location and context, but also temporally throughout the execution of the program.It was at this point that Jay began his nervous breakdown. [Advertisement] Otter - Provision your servers automatically without ever needing to log-in to a command prompt. Get started today!
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by Charles Robinson on (#4805J)
Mark J spent some time as a contractor in the Supply & Inventory division of a Big Government Agency. He helped with the coding efforts on an antiquated requisition system, although as he would come to find, his offers to help went unappreciated.
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by Remy Porter on (#47XTV)
A while back, we saw "Frenk"'s approach to making an unreadable pile of lambda-based Java code. Antonio has some more code, which didn't come from Frenk, but possibly from one of Frenk's disciples, who we'll call "Grenk".Imagine you have a list of users. You want to display those users in order by "lastname, firstname". Your usernames happen to be in the form "firstname.lastname". You also have actual "firstname" and "lastname" fields in your dataset, but ignore those for the moment, because for whatever reason, they never made it to this block of code.There are a lot of relatively straightforward ways you can solve this problem. Especially, as there is already a TreeMap implementation in Java, which accepts a comparator and ensures the keys are sorted. That wouldn't let Grenk show off the cool new things they learned to do with streams and lambdas. There's a (relatively) new toy in the Java language, and gosh darn it, it needs to be used.
by Mark Bowytz on (#47R53)
"Oh man! This results of this McDonalds vote look like they're going to be pretty close...or miles apart...," Pascal writes.
by Remy Porter on (#47NJW)
Dates, as we have explored exhaustively, are hard. And yet, no matter how much we explore dates, and the myriad ways developers can completely screw them up, there are constantly new borders of date-related idiocy ahead of us.The app Michael supported was running on a server running an Ubuntu version that was more than a little ancient, so as a test, he upgraded to the latest LTS version. That also included upgrades to the MySQL version they were running.And right after doing the upgrade, errors like this started to appear: ERROR 1292 (22007): Incorrect datetime value: '2019-07-23 24:59:59' for column 'update_endDate'Well, obviously, 24:59:59 is not a valid datetime value. Obviously, someone rolled a custom date-handling function, and something in the upgrade revealed an off-by-one error. Off-by-one bugs (or “OBOB†as one professor I had liked to call them) are common and easy.Michael’s guess was technically correct. There was an off-by-one error, only it wasn’t in the code. It was in the original developer’s brain:
by Remy Porter on (#47K02)
If you’re doing anything financial in Brazil, you have to manage “CNPJ†numbers. These numbers are unique identifiers for every business and every branch of that business, along with a pair of check-digits to validate that it’s a correct code. Everyone from banks to accountants to businesses needs to track and manage these.When Patria joined a microscopic startup as an intern. The startup made an accounting package, and thus needed to track CNPJs. She asked the lead developer, “Hey, how do I validate those check-digits?â€â€œActually, as an intern, that’s probably a really good beginner task for you.â€They were a very new startup, so it wasn’t a surprise that the current validation routine was simply return True. Patria, with no industry experience, had her task, and ran off to solve the problem.“Could you review my code before I merge?†she asked the lead dev.“Nah, just go ahead and merge, I’m sure it’s fine.â€This is what Patria merged.