You know what definitely never changes? Shipping prices. Famously static, despite all economic conditions and the same across all shipping providers. It doesn't matter where you're shipping from, or to, you know exactly what the price will be to ship that package at all times.

Wait, what? You don't think that's true? It must be true, because Chris sent us this function, which calculates shipping prices, and it couldn't be wrong, could it?

Singletons is arguably the easiest to understand design pattern, and thus, one of the most frequently implemented design patterns, even- especially- when it isn't necessary. Its simplicity is its weakness.

Bartłomiej inherited some code which implemented this pattern many, many times. None of them worked quite correctly, and all of them tried to create a singleton a different way.

Honestly, I don't know what to say about this code sent to us by Austin, beyond "I think somebody was very confused".

string text;
text = "";
// snip
box.Text = text;
text = "";
text = XMLUtil.SanitizeXmlString(text);

Do you know what I had forgotten until this morning? That VBScript (and thus, older versions of Visual Basic) don't require you to use parentheses when calling a function. Foo 5 and Foo(5) are the same thing.

Of course, why would I remember that? I thankfully haven't touched any of those languages since about… 2012. Which is actually a horrifyingly short time ago, back when I supported classic ASP web apps. Even when I did, I always used parentheses because I wanted my code to be something close to readable.

Today's anonymous submitter worked for a "large, US-based, e-commerce company." This particular company was, some time back, looking to save money, and like so many companies do, that meant hiring offshore contractors.

Now, I want to stress, there's certainly nothing magical about national borders which turns software engineers into incompetents. The reality is simply that contractors never have their client's best interests at heart; they only want to be good enough to complete their contract. This gets multiplied by the contracting firm's desire to maximize their profits by keeping their contractors as booked as possible. And it gets further multiplied by the remoteness and siloing of the interaction, especially across timezones. Often, the customer sends out requirements, and three months later gets a finished feature, with no more contact than that- and it never goes well.