CodeSOD

"I consider myself to be a fairly inquisitive guy," Aaron writes, "I tend to not just dive in and start changing code without understanding the system architecture and a general understanding of the business rules."

There are a lot of things that that you can tell about a codebase by looking only at its comments. Seeing things like “// ask Jim for details” imply overly-complex logic that no human (aside from Jim) could understand, while “increment the counter by 1” shows a certain degree of repetitiveness that probably means lots of copy/paste-style code reuse.

It’s a pretty common programming problem: given two dates, determine how many days are between them. Most programmers have the benefit of built-in library code, whether that’s DateTime in .NET, Calendar in Java, and so on. Some – MUMPS programmers, probably – have no choice but to parse and then re-implement the same “30 days hath September…” algorithm. And then of course there are the few who re-implement it anyway, perhaps because they figured that no one else in the history of computing had ever solved that unique problem.

“It seems every other week,” Samuel writes, “there’s a story about outsourcing gone bad. Maybe we’ve been lucky, but for the past decade or so, we simply couldn’t have survived without our friendly team of offsite developers.”

“I was hired as a ‘best practices consultant’ to help bring a 300-developer company’s development practices into the 21st century,” wrote Ian, “and after six months, I had failed.”

“Our codebase is a bit... backwards, to say the least,” writes Aaron Silver, “things that should go up don’t go up or down... instead, they’re painted orange .”

“When a ‘customer’ of ours needs custom-developed software to suit their business requirements,” Kelly Adams writes, “they can either ‘buy’ the development services from the IT department, or go to an outside vendor. In the latter case, then we’re supposed to approve that the software meets corporate security guidelines.”