The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Abstractions II: Pittsburgh Boogaloo

by Remy Porter in Announcements on 2019-05-24

I’ve been a big fan of the work Code and Supply has been doing for years, with their focus on building a community for developers, starting in Pittsburgh and expanding their sights. We’ve co-sponsored a number of events, and I’ve personally found jobs and made friends through the organization.

Their first Abstractions conference, in 2016, was easily one of the best conferences I’ve seen, and they’re bringing it back for 2019.

1 comments - Last comment @ 11:47

"W" is for ..."WTF"

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2019-05-24

"I do my best at teaching my children the basics in life, but then 'educational' toys like this one get in my way," Roger G. writes.

18 comments - Last comment @ 13:12

Powerful Trouble

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2019-05-23

Many years ago, Chris B. worked for a company that made CompactPCI circuit boards. When the spec for hot-swappable boards (i.e., boards that could be added and removed without powering down the system) came out, the company began to make some. Chris became the designated software hot-swap expert.

32 comments - Last comment @ 13:11

Do Fiasco

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-05-22

Consuela works with a senior developer who has been with the company since its founding, has the CEO’s ear, and basically can do anything they want.

These days, what they want to do is code entirely locally on their machine, hand the .NET DLL off to Consuela for deployment, and then complain that their fancy code is being starved for hardware resources.

38 comments - Last comment @ 07:52

Tern Failure into a Success

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-05-21

Oliver Smith stumbled across a small but surprising bug when running some automated tests against a mostly clean code-base. Specifically, they were trying to break things by playing around with different compiler flags and settings. And they did, though in a surprising case.

bool long_name_that_maybe_distracted_someone()
{
  return (execute() ? CONDITION_SUCCESS : CONDITION_FAILURE);
}

23 comments - Last comment @ 06:20

Destroying the Environment

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2019-05-20

Andrew H sends a line that isn't, on its own, terribly horrifying.

Utilities.isTestEnvironment = !"prd".equals(environment);

25 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-22

Professionals Wanted

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2019-05-17

"Searching for 'Pink Tile Building Materials' in Amazon results in a few 'novelty' items sprinkled in, which, to me, isn't a huge surprise," Brian G. wrote, "But, upon closer inspection...professional installation you say?"

18 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-21

True Confession: Without a Map

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-05-16

Today, we have the special true confession from Bruce, who wrote some bad code, but at least knows it’s bad.

Bruce is a C# developer. Bruce is not a web developer. Someone around the office, though, had read an article about how TypeScript was closer to “real” languages, like C#, and asked Bruce to do some TypeScript work.

35 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-23

A Problem in the Backend

by Bobby T. Johnson in Feature Articles on 2019-05-15

Gary works at a medium company. Big enough that workers are specialized in their duty, but small enough to know people in other departments and to make turf wars a little more close and personal: danger close. Most of the departments see themselves as part of a team, but a few individuals see themselves as McCarthy, who will themselves alone save the company and defeat the enemies (who are all spies inside the company sent to destroy it from the inside).

One of these individuals is named Eric. Eric is close to a Kevin. Eric is the front-end developer, and neither likes nor cares about what happens on the backend. Whenever Eric has an issue, he blames the backend. CSS rendering glitch? Backend problem. Browser crash? That’s the backend problem. Slow UI, even when all the data is cached clientside? Definitely a backend problem. Gary used to get mad, but now knows that Eric is so dumb that he doesn’t even know how dumb he is.

35 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-17

Transport Layer Stupidity

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-05-14

Keith H’s boss came by his cube.

“Hey, you know how our insurance quote site has TLS enabled by default?”

29 comments - Last comment @ 12:47

The National Integration

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-05-13

Sergio works for a regional public administration. About a decade ago, the national government passed some laws or made some regulations, and then sent a software package to all the regional administrations. This software package was built to aggregate reports from the local databases into a single, unified, consistent interface on a national website.

Of course, each regional group did things their own way, so the national software package needed to be customized to work. Also, each regional administration had their own reporting package which already did some of this, and which they liked better, because they already knew how it worked. In the case of Sergio's employer, even more important: their organization's logo was prominently displayed.

35 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-18

From Error to Disaster

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2019-05-10

"They're a SEO company, so I'm pretty sure they know what they're doing," Björn E. wrote.

10 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-13

What For?

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-05-09

Pretty much every language has many ways to do loops/iteration. for and while and foreach and do while and function application and recursion and…

It’s just too many. Mike inherited some code which cleans up this thicket of special cases for iteration and just uses one pattern to solve every iteration problem.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-15

The Master is Simplicity

by snoofle in Editor's Soapbox on 2019-05-08

When I was in college, as part of the general course requirements we had to take Probability and Statistics. The first time around I found it to be an impenetrable concept beyond my grasp, and I flunked. Since it was a requirement, I took it again and barely skated by. Joy; I had cleared the hurdle!

By that time, it had become clear to me that I was going into a field that required a whole lot more understanding of P&S than I had acquired. Since I wanted to be properly prepared, I signed up for a free summer school course to try it once more.

50 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-13

Interpolat(interpolation)on

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-05-07

C# has always had some variation on “string interpolation”, although starting in C# version 6, they added an operator for it, to make it easier. Now, you can do something like $"{foo} has a {bar}", which can be a very easy to read method of constructing formatted strings. In this example, {foo} and {bar} will be replaced by the value of variables with the same name.

C#’s implementation is powerful. Pretty much any valid C# expression can be placed inside of those {}. Unfortunately for Petr, that includes the string interpolation operator, as a co-worker’s code demonstrates…

27 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-08

If I Failed

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-05-06

Let's simply start with some code, provided by Adam:

static bool Failed(bool value)
{
    return value;
}

22 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-10

Rise of the Sandwich Based Economy

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2019-05-03

"When I ordered on Hasbro Pulse's site, I don't remember paying using a large sandwich, but...here we are," writes Zeke.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-13

Switching Daily

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-05-02

A not uncommon pattern is to use a dictionary, or array as a lookup table in place of a switch or conditional. In some languages, like Python, there is no switch statement, and dictionaries are the main way to imitate that behavior.

In languages like JavaScript, where the line between objects and dictionaries is blurred to the point of non-existence, it’s a common approach. A lot of switch statements can be converted to an object literal with functions as its values, e.g.:

20 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-13

Inching Along

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-05-01

"Procedures should be as small as possible," is good advice. Like any good advice, you can take it too far.

Mike recently was asked to upgrade a SQL Sever 2000 database to SQL Server 2016. Since this was an upgrade, Mike wasn't supposed to make any changes beyond the necessary changes to make the upgrade work. Still, when he found a bunch of methods with the same basic naming pattern, he had to investigate.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-09

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