Recent CodeSOD

Code Snippet Of the Day (CodeSOD) features interesting and usually incorrect code snippets taken from actual production code in a commercial and/or open source software projects.

Dec 2016

1 Moment in Time

by in CodeSOD on

On occasion, we've all faced a situation where we need to check to see if some internal application process has succeeded, or gotten stuck. There are many ways to accomplish this; some better than others. In the old days, folks used loops to count CPU cycles. Of course, as CPUs got faster, this didn't scale all that well. Now you can use myriad combinations of event handlers, semaphores, thread safe flags and threads. Or you can just use the time tested method of hard coding a sleep.

Of course, this requires that you have a decent idea of how long something will take to complete. It also assumes that you know something about the delays that can reasonably be expected in the execution environment.

48 comments - Last comment @ 2017-01-29

Recycled Code

by in CodeSOD on

Hannes has inherited a legacy project. Like most legacy projects, it has no real documentation, the code is a disorganized mess, and making any change runs a non-zero risk of completely knocking over the house of cards.

What few comments the code has tells us things like this:

22 comments - Last comment @ 2022-09-27

Not Getting the Getters

by in CodeSOD on

The number of customers that might purchase your software has a detectable impact on how you develop that software. If you’re making a smartphone time-killing game, for example, there are potentially hundreds of millions of customers for that game. This drives software in two directions- you have your mounds of shovelware crap that just hope to make a few bucks fleecing suckers, and then you have the tight competition that optimizes the design of the software.

Contrast that to “enterprise” software. If you’re making an ERP, how many potential customers do you have? Thousands? Tens of thousands? And each one of them is going to want something different from your product, so you’ll need to either pile on features or build an Internal Platform that lets them customize it. It doesn’t matter how much money is in this market, or even how many users there are going to be- it’s all about the number of customers that might pay for your product. This, I suspect, is a large part of why enterprise software is terrible, and I think it lays out a corrolary to Remy’s Law of Enterprise Software: the narrower the audience, the worse the software is going to be.

34 comments - Last comment @ 2016-12-23

This is the Endian

by in CodeSOD on

Anyone who’s ever needed to write cross-platform code in C or C++ knows that TRWTF is endianness. Your options are either to use a lot of platform specific preprocessor macros, or to coerce all of your data into your own specific format, for portability.

Adam H’s company took the latter approach, implementing a ByteWriter class. It was relatively easy to use, with code that looked something like this:

30 comments - Last comment @ 2017-02-06

Un-Encoding

by in CodeSOD on

Felix caught a ticket about their OpenId authentication. For some mysterious reason, it had started failing around 30% of the time, specifically because the access token returned by the service was invalid.

Felix had originally written the code, but there was one problem: he wasn’t the last one to touch it. Another development team needed their own versions of the code, organized a bit differently, for infrastructure reasons. Eventually, the whole thing was turned into a drop-in library component that was used by all applications which depended on OpenId. The failures started after they made their changes, so obviously their changes caused the failures.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2017-01-09
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