CodeSOD

Last year, while watching coverage of the Tour de France, Stephan M noticed something a little strange. If he tilted his head by 90° and squinted just a bit, the profile maps showing the peaks and valleys of the mountain stage looked rather familiar. They were just like the monstrous routines written by his predecessor - the very same coder behind the Quadrasort.

At some point, you've probably thought to yourself "I'd love to write some code, but the keywords in my language of choice are just so pedestrian." Your vocabulary is more embiggoned than that of your colleagues. While they're content with DROPping a database object, you'd prefer to efface it. A contractor that Charles I.'s worked with was one of these elite.

There are a lot of reasons to reinvent software. Maybe you don't trust the person who wrote it in the first place. Maybe you wrote it back when you didn't know what you were doing, but this time you'll get it right. Or maybe you didn't know that the solution was built already, right under your nose the whole time.

When Doug D. was asked to investigate a data truncation issue, he figured it'd be pretty easy. He clicked through the application to test it out, and discovered that validation was only handled client side. After turning JavaScript off, he could submit text boxes with more text than would fit in the database column.

"While digging through some database code in our system," Paul L wrote in, "I noticed an interesting pattern emerge. Whenever a boolean value within a SQL result was checked, it would look something like this..."

Although the .NET Framework ships with a comprehensive XML library, Sam B's coworkers aren't big fans of it. It's far too fancy, they claim. Instead, they prefer to use StringBuilders, concatenation, and IndexOf(">")-style parsing.

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"Actually," the lead on Chris G's team said defensively, "this is a quite elegant solution for displaying data in a JSP. This way, we don't have to use the real object and can save memory."

While working a contract at a small educational institution this past summer, Dave R. was asked to "clean up" some of the PHP code behind the institution's main web site. In particular, the IT manager asked if course listings couldn't be sorted so that courses appeared ordered by their starting dates.