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Nov 14Classic WTF - The Fizz Buzz from Outer Space
by in CodeSOD on 2014-12-24To close things out for 2014, we're re-running our most popular articles. Without further ado, enjoy one of our most popular; this one originally ran in September.
Matteo recently interviewed a candidate that was employed elsewhere as an “architect”. His responses to the standard soft-skills questions sounded a bit rehearsed, which made Matteo suspicious, so he started asking some more technical questions, like: “What’s the difference between an interface and an abstract class?”
When one of Felix G’s newest design customers decided that they were officially unhappy with their current web-agency, another company's loss was his gain.
Most programmers are familiar with a notion of technical debt. Sometimes all it takes to make or break a project is a single bad decision, questionable design solution, or even a plain old bug that doesn't get fixed early on. The hacks and workarounds keep piling up, slowly turning the project into an unmaintainable mess.
Arty works on a team maintaining a legacy application that can best be described as a birds nest of code. It is a massive collection of global variables and a few tens of thousands of routines that would independently modify the data. Decapsulation was the overriding design pattern of choice. Of course, changing the value of some variable invariably has all sorts of unpredictable side affects. Naturally, this lead management to be fearful of making any changes, no matter how urgent, for fear of what would inevitably happen.