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.

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.

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again."

We have all encountered situations where we need to attempt an operation, with full knowledge that the operation might very well fail. And if it does, we should retry it. Usually after a delay, usually with a maximum number of retries.

Today’s anonymous submitter is an experienced Python developer. Their team is significantly less experienced. In the interests of training, someone suggested, “Perhaps we should buy books for everyone.” Our submitter was handed a stack of possible books, and asked to pick the best one to help the team mature.

One book spent some time discussing types, and the conversion between them. By way of example, it provided a handy method which would turn a string into a floating point number:

Last week we saw an attempt to reinvent the ceil function. Tina raised a protest: "6 lines to re-implement a ceil function? We can do better."

//Rounds to 1000d Superior
public int round1000dSup(int value_To_Round) {
    int finalResult = 0;
    int resultIntermediate = value_To_Round / 1000;
    resultIntermediate += 1;
    int valueRounded = resultIntermediate * 1000;
    if ((valueRounded - value_To_Round) == 1000) {
        finalResult = value_To_Round;
    } else {
        finalResult = valueRounded;
    }
    return finalResult;
}