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... or maybe I should have said both here and there?
The Beast in Black has an equivocal fuel system. "Apparently, the propane level in my storage tank just went quantum, and even the act of observing the level has not collapsed the superposition of more propane and less propane. I KNEW that the Copenhagen Interpretation couldn't be objectively correct."
Usually, when we have a "Tales from the Interview" we're focused on bad interviewing practices. Today, we're mixing up a "Tales" with a CodeSOD.
Today's Anonymous submitter does tech screens at their company. Like most companies do, they give the candidate a simple toy problem, and ask them to solve it. The goal here is not to get the greatest code, but as our submitter puts it, "weed out the jokers".
Kleyguerth was having a hard time tracking down a bug. A _hasPicked flag was "magically" toggling itself to on. It was a bug introduced in a recent commit, but the commit in question was thousands of lines, and had the helpful comment "Fixed some stuff during the tests".
In several places, the TypeScript code checks a property like so:
Calendars today may be controlled by a standards body, but that's hardly an inherent fact of timekeeping. Dates and times are arbitrary and we structure them to our convenience.
If we rewind to ancient Rome, you had the role of Pontifex Maximus. This was the religious leader of Rome, and since honoring the correct feasts and festivals at the right time was part of the job, it was also the standards body which kept the calendar. It was, ostensibly, not a political position, but there was also no rule that an aspiring politician couldn't hold both that post and a political post, like consul. This was a loophole Julius Caesar ruthlessly exploited; if his political opposition wanted to have an important meeting on a given day, whoops! The signs and portents tell us that we need to have a festival and no work should be done!
A ticket came in marked urgent. When users were entering data in the header field, the spaces they were putting in kept getting mangled. This was in production, and had been in production for sometime.
Mike P picked up the ticket, and was able to track down the problem to a file called Strings.java. Yes, at some point, someone wrote a bunch of string helper functions and jammed them into a package. Of course, many of the functions were re-implementations of existing functions: reinvented wheels, now available in square.
An Anonymous quality analyst and audiophile accounted "As a returning customer at napalmrecords.com I was forced to update my Billing Address. Fine. Sure. But what if my *House number* is a very big number? More than 10 "symbols"? Fortunately, 0xDEADBEEF for House number and J****** for First Name both passed validation."
Most languages these days have some variation of "is string null or empty" as a convenience function. Certainly, C#, the language we're looking at today does. Let's look at a few example of how this can go wrong, from different developers.
We start with an example from Jason, which is useless, but not a true WTF:
We're going to start with the code, and then talk about it. You've seen it before, you know the chorus: bad date handling:
C_DATE($1)
C_STRING(7;$0)
C_STRING(3;$currentMonth)
C_STRING(2;$currentDay;$currentYear)
C_INTEGER($month)
$currentDay:=String(Day of($1))
$currentDay:=Change string("00";$currentDay;3-Length($currentDay))
$month:=Month of($1)
Case of
: ($month=1)
$currentMonth:="JAN"
: ($month=2)
$currentMonth:="FEB"
: ($month=3)
$currentMonth:="MAR"
: ($month=4)
$currentMonth:="APR"
: ($month=5)
$currentMonth:="MAY"
: ($month=6)
$currentMonth:="JUN"
: ($month=7)
$currentMonth:="JUL"
: ($month=8)
$currentMonth:="AUG"
: ($month=9)
$currentMonth:="SEP"
: ($month=10)
$currentMonth:="OCT"
: ($month=11)
$currentMonth:="NOV"
: ($month=12)
$currentMonth:="DEC"
End case
$currentYear:=Substring(String(Year of($1));3;2)
$0:=$currentDay+$currentMonth+$currentYear