For testing networking systems, load simulators are useful: send a bunch of realistic looking traffic and see what happens as you increase the amount of sent traffic. These sorts of simulators often rely on being heavily multithreaded, since one computer can, if pushed, generate a lot of network traffic.

Thus, when Jonas inherited a heavily multithreaded system for simulating load, that wasn't a surprise. The surprise was that the developer responsible for it didn't really understand threading in Java. Probably in other languages too, but in this case, Java was what they were using.

Sebastian is now maintaining a huge framework which, in his words, "could easily be reduced in size by 50%", especially because many of the methods in it are reinvented wheels that are already provided by .NET and specifically LINQ.

For example, if you want the first item in a collection, LINQ lets you call First() or FirstOrDefault() on any collection. The latter option makes handling empty collections easier. But someone decided to reinvent that wheel, and like so many reinvented wheels, it's worse.

Today's code, at first, just looks like using literals instead of constants. Austin sends us this C#, from an older Windows Forms application:

if (e.KeyChar == (char)4) {   // is it a ^D?
        e.Handled = true;
        DoStuff();
}
else if (e.KeyChar == (char)7) {   // is it a ^g?
        e.Handled = true;
        DoOtherStuff();
}
else if (e.KeyChar == (char)Keys.Home) {
        e.Handled = true;
        SpecialGoToStart();
}
else if (e.KeyChar == (char)Keys.End) {
        e.Handled = true;
        SpecialGoToEnd();
} 

"Boy, stringly typed data is hard to work with. I wish there were some easier way to work with it!"

This, presumably, is what Gary's predecessor said. Followed by, "Wait, I have an idea!"

DZ's tech lead is a doctor of computer science, and that doctor loves to write code. But you already know that "PhD" stands for "Piled high and deep", and that's true of the tech lead's clue.

For example, in C#:

It takes a lot of time and effort to build a code base that exceeds 100kloc. Rome wasn't built in a day; it just burned down in one.

Liza was working in a Python shop. They had a mildly successful product that ran on Linux. The sales team wanted better sales software to help them out, and instead of buying something off the shelf, they hired a C# developer to make something entirely custom.