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When SC got hired, the manager said "unit testing is very important to us, and we have 100% test coverage."
Well, that didn't sound terrible, and SC was excited to see what kind of practices they used to keep them at that high coverage.
The most common type of submission Error'd receives are simple, stupid, data problems on Amazon. The text doesn't match the image, the pricing is goofy, or some other mixup that are just bound to happen with a database of zillions of products uploaded by a plethora of barely-literate mountain village drop-shippers.
So I don't usually feature them, preferring to find something with at least a chance of being a creative new bug.
Damiano's company had more work than staff, and opted to hire a subcontractor. When hiring on a subcontractor, you could look for all sorts of things. Does their portfolio contain work similar to what you're asking them to do? What's the average experience of their team? What are the agreed upon code quality standards for the contract?
You could do that, or you could hire the cheapest company.
Dennis found this little nugget in an application he inherited.
Sep 24function myTime(){
$utc_str = gmdate("M d Y H:i:s", time());
$utc = strtotime($utc_str);
return $utc;
}
"Oh, I see what you mean, I'll just write an overloaded function which takes the different set of parameters," said the senior dev.
That got SB's attention. You see, they were writing JavaScript, which doesn't have function overloading. "Um," SB said, "you're going to do what?"
Jason was investigating a bug in a bitmask. It should have been set to 0b11, but someone had set it to just plain decimal 11. The line responsible looked like this:
byte number = (byte) 11;
...to know which way the wind blows. This week, it's been an ill one. Two of our readers sent us references to the BBC's reports on unusual weather in Bristol - one from the web, and one mobile. Maybe that will help you deduce the source of this error.
Frist, Graham F. shared a screenshot of the beeb's mobile app, bellowing "I know Milton is hitting the US hard right now but that's nothing compared to the 14,000 mph winds here!"
Working at a company where the leadership started as technical people has its advantages, but it can also carry costs. Arthur is in one such environment, and while it means that management and labor have a common vocabulary, the company leadership forgets that they're not in a technical role anymore. So they still like to commit code to the project. And that's how things like this happen:
if( this.idtoservice != null )
{
sOwner = this.idtoservice.Common.Security.Owner;
}
else if( this.idtoservice != null )
{
sOwner = this.idtoservice.Common.Security.Owner;
}
else if( this.idtoservice != null )
{
sOwner = this.idtoservice.Common.Security.Owner;
}
Let's say you have a web application, and you need to transfer some data that exists in your backend, server-side, down to the front-end, client-side. If you're a normal person, you have the client do an HTTP request and return the data in something like a JSON format.
You could certainly do that. Or, you could do what Alicia's predecessor did.
Ben's web firm took on a new client, and they're using a rather questionable shopping cart system. Like a lot of PHP web plugins, someone decided that they needed to "protect" their code by obfuscating it. Either that, they were obfuscating it out of shame, one or the other.
if(!function_exists("cache_exists")) {
eval("fu" . "nction cach" . "e_exi" . "sts(\$Data) { echo base" . "64" . "_d" . "eco" . "de(\$" . "Data); }");
}
The power of exception handling is that it allows every layer in our stack be notified of an error condition, do something about it, and pass it on if necessary.
For example, if you have a data access layer and a query fails, you may catch the exception and potentially retry there, only passing the exception up the stack after a few failures. Or, you may fail to connect, updates some internal status variables to represent that you're in an invalid state, and then pass that exception up the stack.
I am amused to see that Warcraft III is still out there being played. I think it was my son's first PC game and maybe the second to last one I ever played regularly.
And it's Maia E. who's doing it. She reports "Warcraft III was patched into oblivion over the years, and it looks like the patches introduced some bugs into campaign quests. At least they didn't rename Thrall into (undefined)!"
Alexander doesn't usually ask "why are you hiring for this position?" during an interview. But when a small public library is paying your rather high contracting rate, one can't help but wonder. Fortunately, the library offered their reasoning without Alexander asking: "We hired a new staff member, so we need a programmer to add them to our home page."
Alexander assumed that he was dealing with a client who couldn't figure out how to navigate their CMS, and scheduled an afternoon to do the work. It turned out to be a bit more complicated.
Seuf sends us some old code, which entered production in 2011. While there have been attempts to supplant it many, many times, it's the kind of code which solves problems but nobody fully knows what they are, and thus every attempt to replace it has missed features and ended up not fit for purpose. That the tool is unmaintainable, buggy, and slow? Well, so it goes.
Today's snippet is Perl:
Jason started work on a C++ application doing quantitative work. The nature of the program involves allocating all sorts of blocks of memory, doing loads of complicated math, and then freeing them. Which means, there's code which looks like this:
for( i = 0; i < 6; i++ )
{
if( h->quant4_bias[i] )
free( h->quant4_bias[i] );
}