Recent Articles

Dec 2024

Enterprise Code Coverage

by in CodeSOD on

Alice has the dubious pleasure of working with SalesForce. Management wants to make sure that any code is well tested, so they've set a requirement that all deployed code needs 75% code coverage. Unfortunately, properly configuring a code coverage tool is too hard, so someone came up with a delightful solution: just count how many lines are in your tests and how many lines are in your code, and make sure that your tests make up 75% of the total codebase.

Given those metrics, someone added this test:


Doubled Daniel

by in Error'd on

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."


Building Blocks

by in CodeSOD on

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:


On VVVacation

by in CodeSOD on

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:


Layered Like Spaghetti

by in CodeSOD on

"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.


A Pair of Loops

by in CodeSOD on

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.