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.

Oct 2017

Drain the Swamp

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You may remember Virginia N from An Extinction Event, where she struggles to refactor a legacy project with some… unusual design principles. ReSharper still continues to choke to death on their codebase, but her management has let her know, this won’t be a problem going forward.

“You see,” her boss explained, “we’re going to move the logic into stored procedures. That way, we can more easily re-use the logic between the Windows Forms client and the Web app.”


10001 Problems

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A rat leaving a ship via the mooring rope, thus spreading th Wellcome V0010685

Our Anonymous submitter's first job was helping to support a distributed system running in a low-energy embedded platform. Interesting on its face, the platform was actually a bloated, outdated monstrosity made worse by the decision to use C++ in conjunction with a homemade (read: unsafe) binary data format.


The Key to Lookups

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After some “miscommunications about coding standards”, Nicolas’s company decided that they should have one of their internal developers do code reviews on anything that came from their external, third-party developers. Nicolas drew the short straw on the most recent project.

The specific problem in play is that they had config-data, structured as nested dictionaries. You know the kind of data-structure- something like:


Abstract Test Case

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A great many breakfast cereals promise some sort of health benefit. This brand is good for your heart, that brand has 11 essential vitamins and minerals. This one’s got bran! Just because there’s a promise of health benefits doesn’t mean they actually exist- most of these cereals are lightly fluffed sugar held together with a smidge of starch.

Object-oriented languages promise a lot of code-health benefits, and used properly, they can certainly deliver. In this somewhat tortured metaphor, the Lucky Charms marshmallow of OO features is Inheritance. It’s tasty, it’s easy to explain, but it’s not really good for your code. A little bit, here-and-there, from time-to-time is great. But some folks buy the three pound bag and that’s just not good for anybody.


Too Salty

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The first rule of building your own password storage mechanisms is don’t. Like most other highly-specialized wheels, you aren’t going to do as good a job as someone who specializes in it. It’s bad enough when you write your own date mangling code, but for security-critical features, like passwords or encryption, you’re begging for trouble.

Joni spotted some trouble: many of the users in the database had the same password hash. This, of course, should never happen- the password should be combined with a user-specific salt as part of the hashing, so that even if two users had the same password, they’d have different hashes.


RAM On Through

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The company Tomasz worked for launched a new device line with more RAM than the previous generation. This was supposed to put an end to the sort of memory shortages common to embedded systems. However, it wasn't long before they began hearing from clients whose systems crashed whenever they attempted to upgrade the accompanying software package.


We Know How This Works

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One of the selling points of a language like Java is that it comes with a rich standard library of useful classes. This allows developers to completely ignore those useful features, and instead reinvent the wheel badly. Once this novel square wheel has come off the assembly line, it becomes the defacto standard for the organization.

Take, for example, Caiwan’s office. They have a… special date-handling library.


A Case of Bad Timing

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Although I've retired from full time work, I still consult for lots of small mom-n-pop places. Mostly, it's little scripts to automate doing this and that. Sometimes, the boss' kid or nephew was asked to get ambitious and solve a problem. When the inevitable happens, they call me to bail them out.

For the most part, it's usually something like some file got moved/renamed/deleted. Sometimes, they got ambitious and attempted to write a batch file. This time, a college freshman, who claimed to be "good with computers", had written a program to control the little scripts and jobs in an automated fashion. Apparently, it was getting too complicated for him and they asked me if I could work with it.


The Anty Pattern

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An anti-pattern that shows up from time to time here is the old “our IDE’s build output is mapped to a network drive on the web server”, but “Drummer” shows us a novel new variation on that theme.

It all started when a co-worker asked them, “how do I change the compiler version?” The code was built using Ant, so “Drummer” opened the build file and searched through it for a javac element- the Ant command which runs the Java compiler.


Dashboard Confessional

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Three years ago, this XKCD comic captured a lot of the problems we have with gathering requirements:

A comic where a customer asks a developer to a) Take a photo and determine if it's in a national park (easy says the dev), b) determine if it's of a bird (I need a research team and 5 years)