Alex Papadimoulis

Think of all those old applications you’ve had to maintain. You know the type: the ones written by long-forgotten developers in long-lost languages. The ones that, after spending days searching for that one line of code that needs to be changed, you frustratingly decree “this f%*#@ thing needs to be rewritten.” And, naturally, the ones that never are, nor never will be rewritten.

"While digging through some inherited code," writes Joe "M2tM" Smith, "I encountered a conditional masquerading as a loop."

Andrew Carpenter writes, "I guess this is like turn-oning off a switch?"

Everyone knows that "Magic Numbers" are bad, Bad, BAD! Take, for example, dividing something into quarters. Because including the literal "4" in your code would be a Magic Number, many developers agree that it's best to define a constant named "FOUR", and then use that constant instead. Makes sense, right?

Role-based security requires, at a minimum, two key elements: users and roles. Roles (such as Administrator, Clerk, and ViewOnlyUser) are defined by the application code and then assigned to users to restrict which functions of the application they may use. It's a pretty simple concept that involves all of two database tables, or one if the user names come from some external source like Active Directory.

"I got this elegant statement of existential philosophy from Microsoft's Process Monitor utility," Matthew wrote, "It died while trying to start up, so yes indeed, for a few shining moments, the application was."

One of the great things about Boolean logic is its simplicity. At the most basic level, there's simply TRUE and FALSE with AND, OR, and NOT. It takes a lot of work to overcomplicate such a simple system, yet "certain" developers seem to find such over-complication second nature. Take E.H.'s colleague, for example.

Bert Glanstron, Greg thought to himself, why does that name sound so familiar? Bert… Glanstron… did I work with him? Did he go to my high school?

James sent in today's snippet with virtually no introduction; just six, measly words: "the grass is definitely not greener." Normally, that'd be a bit frustrating, since it's always nice to know a little history or background about the code. But like those six word stories, James told the classic tale of the young and burgeoning software developer who’s always looking to expand his professional purview by seeking out new opportunities to learn and sharpen his skills, only to find his efforts frustrated by a “seemed good on paper” job that leads to nowhere – or worse – towards destitute and despair.

"Recently, I inherited an ASP.NET web application that hadn't been touched in many a year," wrote Scott Schottler, "I was pleasantly surprised to see that, not only did it successfully convert from a Visual Studio 2003 project, but that it actually built without errors."

Remi works on one of his country's largest Internet Service Providers, and has the fortune to be on an elite team that focuses on agile development. Or misfortune, depending on how you look at it: at his company, "agile development" actually means "we need that in two weeks".