The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Aarb!

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-11-30

C++’s template system is powerful and robust enough that template metaprogramming is Turing complete. Given that kind of power, it’s no surprise that pretty much every other object-oriented language eschews templates for code generation.

Java, for example, uses generics- essentially templates without the metaprogramming. What we still keep is compile-time type-safety, and all the benefits of generic programming, but without the complexity of compile-time code generation.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2017-12-23

Thanks, Google

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2017-11-29

Gold Certificate

"Dealing with real customers is a hard job," Katya declared from the safety of the employee breakroom. "Dealing with big companies is even harder!"

26 comments - Last comment @ 2017-12-25

A Handful of Beans

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2017-11-28

The startup Juan worked for was going through a growth spurt. There was more work than there were people, and plenty of money, so that meant interviews. Lots, and lots of interviews.

Enter Octavio. Octavio had an impressive resume, had worked for decades as a consultant, and was the project lead on an open source project called “JavaBachata”. Before the interview, Juan gave the project site a quick skim, and it looked like one of those end-to-end ORM/MVC frameworks.

34 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-19

The Delivery Moose

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-11-27

We know stereotypes are poor placeholders for reality. Still, if we name a few nations, there are certain traits and themes that come to mind. Americans are fat, loud, gregarious, and love making pointless smalltalk. The English are reserved, love tea, and have perfected the art of queuing. The French are snobbish, the Japanese have weaponized politeness, the Finns won’t stand within ten meters of another human being at the bus stop, and so on. They can range from harmless to downright offensive and demeaning.

Laurent is Canadian, working for an insurance company. Their software is Russian- in that it comes from a Russian vendor, with a support contract that gives them access to a Russian dev team to make changes. While reviewing commits, Laurent found one simply labeled: “Fix some Sonars issue”.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2017-11-30

Classic WTF: The Shadow over ShipPoint

by Dan J. in Feature Articles on 2017-11-24

What's this? A re-run of a spooky article on the day after Thanksgiving? Well, what's spookier than Black Friday? --Remy
Original

In the winter of 2012-13, I was fired from the ill-rumored e-commerce company known as ShipPoint. Though I remained stalwart to the end, the wretched darkness embodied in ShipPoint's CTO and his twisted worshipers dogs me still, a malignant growth choking the very life out of my career aspirations. And although I fight every day to forget, to leave my time at ShipPoint behind, I still awaken in the uttermost black of night, shuddering, my mind wrenching itself free from nightmare's grip. I record this grim history only because I fear I may soon slip irredeemably into madness.

It was 2011 when, freshly downsized, I found myself wandering the LinkedIn Jobs Directory, seemingly in vain. I had almost made up my mind to hang out my shingle as a consultant when I received an email from a recruiter. I don't remember his name, nor the firm that he claimed to represent, only that he demanded that we meet in person; apparently he was privy to a lucrative opportunity whose details could only be revealed face to face. While suspicious, I must admit I was gripped by curiosity — tinged, I must now believe, with a touch of the wild. I met the recruiter, a grim, swarthy fellow of furtive glance and questionable heritage, in a refuse-choked alley far from the central business district. It was there, amidst the dumpsters and commercial-grade recycling bins, that I first heard in a grating croak the name whose syllables I would one day shudder to write.

41 comments - Last comment @ 2017-12-15

Give Thanks for Well Routed Packets

by Remy Porter in Editor's Soapbox on 2017-11-23

It’s Thanksgiving here in the US, so we’re taking a long weekend. In lieu of a more traditional “from the archives” post, I’m going to give thanks.

You know what I’m thankful for? I’m thankful that data packets on the Internet are routed and handled the same way, regardless of which network originated them, nor which network is their destination, nor what they may contain. You could say that networks are… neutral about packets.

52 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-19

Arrject

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-11-22

There are some submissions that we get, and we simply sit on, because there’s nothing much to say about them. They’re awful code, but there’s no major comments to be added. It’s clear and simple in its awfulness.

For example, you have some code that needs to display details about colleges around the US. Each College has a name, a full name, a short name, a state and city where it exists, and full names for those states and cities. You are likely reaching for an object to store that information, but why do that, when you can employ what I call the “Arrject Pattern”. Y’know, when instead of using objects, you use multiple arrays and store related data at the same index? Stuff like what Kevin found in his codebase:

42 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-20

Jumped The Gun

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2017-11-21

1904 Olympic sprint

Sheldon was a support engineer at Generic Media Co. In his 6 years with the company, he'd enjoyed working for several great managers—but then came the reorg. Once the dust cleared, he found himself in the wrong department, reporting to one of the most loathed individuals in the entire organization.

46 comments - Last comment @ 2017-12-01

The Generated JavaScript

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-11-20

Once upon a time, I discovered a bug in some JavaScript. I went off to investigate the source, only to find… the JS wasn’t coming from a file. It was being generated by a server-side method. Through string concatenation. It was a simple generation, something along the lines of:

jsCode += "location.href = 'foo?id=" + someIdField + "';\n";

23 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-19

Never ASSume that You're Free from Errors

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2017-11-17

"This was in an email from Nest. I'm sure in some other font this shows a heartwarming image of fluffy bunnies frolicking in an energy saving Utopia, but instead, we get this," wrote Matthew W.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2017-11-20

Delebation

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-11-16

When faced with an API or programming paradigm that requires repetitive, boilerplate code, a developer is left with two options. They may refine or adapt the API/paradigm, using the idioms of their language to make something tedious and verbose into something elegant and clear.

Or they just automate it. If you have a mile of boilerplate that’s mostly the same across the application, just generate that. It’s like copy/paste, but, y’know… automatic.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2017-11-20

The For While Loop

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2017-11-15

Alex R. was the architect of a brand spanking new system that was to read inputs from numerous other internal systems, crunch a whole bunch of numbers, record everything in a database and spew forth a massive report file. He spent months designing the major details of the system, and more months designing the various sub-components. From all this came a variety of business-level data structures which spawned POJOs and the underlying DB tables to store assorted inputs, flags and outputs. He did a fairly thorough job of documenting all the interfaces, and provided detailed specifications for all of the next-level methods that were left as TBDs in the design.

The project manager then assigned units of work to numerous offshored junior developers who managed to get virtually everything wrong. If they couldn't understand what a spec required, they changed the spec to reflect what they actually wrote. This caused Alex to start versioning the requirements document in order to catch the changes by the junior developers so that they could be rolled back.

40 comments - Last comment @ 2017-11-27

One's Company

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-11-14

The more you learn about something, the less confident you often become in making statements about it, because you understand the complexities of the matter. If, for example, I asked you to help me refine my definition of how dates and times work, you know that many assumptions are wrong. Or if we tried to define what makes a string a person’s name, we’ll run into similar problems. This is even true for a value we’ve all probably seen implemented as a boolean value: gender. The more you learn about these subjects, the more complex and nuanced your understanding of them becomes. More and more, your answers start with, “It’s complicated…”.

Eugene was going through some code at a customer’s site, and he found that their business logic depended heavily on a flag ISCOMAPNY (sic), but there was no ISCOMPANY field anywhere in the database. There was, however, a SEX field on the customer records, implemented as an integer.

61 comments - Last comment @ 2017-12-26

An Exceptional Contract

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2017-11-13

The life of a contractor can be precarious. Contracts end- sometimes suddenly, and you rarely know what the organization you’re working for is actually like until it’s too late.

Ian S, for example, was contracting for a platform-as-a-service (PAAS) company, adding new features to their existing infrastructure automation system. It was the kind of place that had two copies of the same code-base, maintained side-by-side, just so that a single customer could use a script they’d written eight years prior.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-04

It Doesn't Mean What You Think it Means

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2017-11-10

"TRWTF here is I can't believe they shorted me on my change!" writes Diane B.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2017-11-18

Theory Versus Reality

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2017-11-09

I went to college at the State University of New York at Albany, where back then, most of the Computer Science curriculum courses were entitled Theory of xxx. The programming assignments were the usual small-scope demonstrations of some feature of programming, typically something an experienced developer would code in 15-20 LOC.

My Masters project was to modify the TeX typesetting system (by Knuth) to leverage the more advanced features of a new typesetting system. It took me about two months to reverse engineer it only to find that the entire required modification amounted to a single character change.

48 comments - Last comment @ 2023-05-19

Lowest-Bidder Conversion

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-11-08

Circa 2003, or so, Annie’s employer contracted a lowest-bidder to produce a relatively massive .NET Web Forms project. The code was built, signed off, and chucked into production without any of the in-house developers being involved, despite being the team that would support it in the long term. There was no documentation, no knowledge transfer, and no code review.

Over the next few years, there was a rush of feature requests as gaps in functionality were found. A series of in-house developers passed through, doing their best to patch them in, but the original project’s code quality didn’t exactly make it maintainable, and since they were operating in a rush, they weren’t exactly improving the code quality.

30 comments - Last comment @ 2017-11-22

Replacement Trainwreck

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2017-11-07

There's an old saying about experience in IT: Some people have 10 years of experience, and some have 1 year 10 times. Every day, someone learns the hard way how true this statement really is.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2017-11-12

The Distract Factory Pattern

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-11-06

The Gang-of-Four design patterns have an entire category of creational patterns, to handle the complexities of creating objects. And yes, it can get complicated, especially when we think in terms of the single-responsibility principle. Often, creating an instance of an class is itself so complex that we need a new class to do it.

Thus, we have the Factory pattern. And the Abstract Factory Pattern. And the Abstract Factory Factory Abstract Provider Bean pattern, if you’re using Spring. The purpose of these patterns is to add indirection between the client, calling code, and the creation of the objects- different concrete implementations can be instantiated, without the client code needing to worry about what actual type it received. Polymorphism wins the day. Code is more loosely coupled, because the client code never needs to name the concrete type it uses.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2017-11-21

Going for the Gold!

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2017-11-03

"Starting from one star, I'm almost at that gold five-star rating," writes Sam K.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2017-11-09

Switching the Search

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-11-02

We return to Virginia N’s refactoring efforts (previously: here, and here).

This code is elegant in its stupidity, combining two anti-patterns in one glorious, “No, don’t do that, whyyyyyyyyyy!”. To wit, the for-switch, and the “build SQL statements through string concatenation”:

27 comments - Last comment @ 2017-11-08

An Academic Consideration

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-11-01

Becky is not a programmer, but a physicist. She works in academia, alongside other scientists. Modern science generally requires some sort of heavy computation, which means scientists write code. It’s often not very good code, but that’s just the nature of the beast. The code exists to provide an analysis, not to be deployed as an app to the masses.

Most of the time. A few civil engineers were working on a brand new Android app for traffic analysis, with plans to distribute it. Unfortunately, they had some problems, and wanted more experienced eyes. Becky set aside the Fortran77 she was working on to trace through their Java code, and found this:

28 comments - Last comment @ 2024-05-21

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