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This week, a double dose of Daniel D.
First he shared a lesson he titled "Offer you can't refuse a.k.a. Falsehood programmers believe about prices" explaining "Some programmers believe that new prices per month (when paid annually) are always better then the old ones (when paid monthly). Only this time they have forgotten their long-time clients on legacy packages."
Eli sends us something that's not quite a code sample, despite coming from code. It's not a representative line, because it's many lines. But it certainly is representative.
Here's the end of one of their code files:
As often happens, Luka started some work but didn't get it across the finish line before a scheduled vacation. No problem: just hand it off to another experienced developer.
Luka went off for a nice holiday, the other developer hammered away at code, and when Luka came back, there was this lovely method already merged to production, sitting and waiting:
"We use a three tier architecture," said the tech lead on Cristian's new team. "It helps us keep concerns separated."
This statement, as it turned out, was half true. They did divide the application into three tiers- a "database layer", a "business layer", and a "presentation layer". The "database layer" was a bunch of Java classes. The "business layer" was a collection of Servlets. And the "presentation layer" was a pile of JSP files.
Alexandra inherited a codebase that, if we're being kind, could be called "verbose". Individual functions routinely cross into multiple thousands of lines, with the longest single function hitting 4,000 lines of code.
Very little of this is because the problems being solved are complicated, and much more of it is because people don't understand how anything works.
...or actually, it doesn't. A few fans found figures that just didn't add up. Here they are.
Steven J Pemberton deserves full credit for this finding. "My bank helpfully reminds me when it's time to pay my bill, and normally has no problem getting it right. But this month, the message sent Today 08:02, telling me I had to pay by tomorrow 21-Nov was sent on... 21-Nov. The amount I owed was missing the decimal point. They then apologised for freaking me out, but got that wrong too, by not replacing the placeholder for the amount I really needed to pay. "
Today is holiday in the US, where we celebrate a cosplay version of history with big meals and getting frustrated with our family. It's also a day where we are thankful- usually to not be at work, but also, thankful to not work with Brad. Original --Remy
Anita parked outside the converted garage, the printed graphic reading Global Entertainment Strategies (GES) above it. When the owner, an old man named Brad, had offered her a position after spotting her in a student computer lab, she thought he was crazy, but a background check confirmed everything he said. Now she wondered if her first intuition was correct.
“Anita, welcome!” Brad seemed to bounce like a toddler as he showed Anita inside. The walls of the converted garage were bare drywall; the wall-mounted AC unit rattled and spat in the corner. In three corners of the office sat discount computer desks. Walls partitioned off Brad’s office in the fourth corner.
Today, we're going to start with the comment before the method.
/**
* The topology type of primitives to render. (optional)<br>
* Default: 4<br>
* Valid values: [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
*
* @param mode The mode to set
* @throws IllegalArgumentException If the given value does not meet
* the given constraints
*
*/