Good logging is an invaluable tool for debugging and diagnosing your applications. No logging makes that job harder, but not as hard as bad logging. Logging that doesn't log useful information, that doesn't help highlight the flow of the application, etc.

Volker was trying to track down a bug that was only raising its head in production, but the log files were spammed with nothing more than "echo". Millions and millions of log lines that were just that. A quick CTRL+F through the code later, and the offending method was found:

C++ templates are, notoriously, a Turing complete language on their own. They're complicated, even when you're trying to do something simple. Related languages avoid that complexity, and favor generics. Generics are templates with all the sharp bits filed down, but still powerful enough to make datastructures that don't need to know the details of the data they're operating on.

This article isn't about generics, though. It's about ORMs, specifically the .NET Entity Framework system. It's common to use the Repository Pattern to abstract out data access a bit. Coupled with the underlying DBSet class, which roughly represents a database table, you can easily create repository objects and related mocks for testing.

Patsy's company has a product that's "number one" in their particular industry. It generates lots of revenue, but a lot of the code dates back to the far-off year of… 2017. Coding practices were… uh… different, four years ago? Especially in the rapidly maturing language of… Java?

Within Patsy's company, they do refer to their 2017 code as "legacy" code, and it has left quite the legacy. For example, here's how they parse numbers:

When we write code, we have certain assumptions. Most of these times, these assumptions are fine, and allow us to skip past some hard decisions. But sometimes, these can lead to problems. The infamous example would be the Y2K problem- the assumption that nobody'd be running this program in 40 years seemed reasonable at the time. We might assume that nobody'd type too fast. We might assume our sensor is accurate.

Darren sends us some code that has a much milder assumption than those: