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Put on some comfy pants, we're back again with a little something different, brought to you by Raygun. This week's installment starts with exploding hard drives, and only Steve Buscemi can save us. Today's episode contains small quantities of profanity.
Raygun provides a window into how users are really experiencing your software applications.
About 15 years a go, I had this job where I was requested to set up and administer an MQ connection from our company to the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC). Since I had no prior experience with MQ, I picked up the manual, learned a few commands, and in a day or so, had a script to create queue managers, queues, disk backing stores, etc. I got the system analysts (SA's) at both ends on the phone and in ten minutes had connectivity to their test and production environments. Access was applied for and granted to relevant individuals and applications, and application coding could begin.
I didn't know the full and complete way to manage most of the features of MQ, but I had figured out enough to properly support what we needed. Total time was 2.5 man-days of effort.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and when it's a picture of code, you could say that it contains a thousand words, too. Especially when it's bad code.
Here we have a work of true art. The symmetry hearkens back to the composition of a frame of a Wes Anderson film, and the fact that this snippet starts on line 418 tells us that there's more to this story, something exotic happening just outside of frame. The artist is actively asking questions about what we know is true, with the method calls? —I think they're method calls— which take too many parameters, most of which are false. There are hints of an Inner Platform, but they're left for the viewer to discover. And holding it all together are the funnel-like lines which pull the viewer's eyes, straight through the midline, all the way down to the final DataType.STRING, which really says it all, doesn't it? DataType.STRING indeed.
When does anything but [0-9A-F] equal "2222"? Well, it's a holiday in the US today, so take a look at this classic WTF where that's exactly what happens… -Remy
A little while back, I posted a function that generated random hexadecimal-like strings for a GUID-like string to identify events. At first, I thought it (and the rest of the system that Taka's company purchased) was just bad code. But now that I look at it further, I'm stunned at its unbelievable complexity. I can honestly say that I've never seen code that is actually prepared to run a quantum computer, where binary just isn't as simple as 1's and 0's ...
"Well, it looks like Google News was inebriated as well!" Daniel wrote.
We're back again with a little something different, brought to you by Raygun. Once again, the cast of "Improv for Programmers" is going to create some comedy on the fly for you, and this time… you could say it's… transformative. Today's episode contains small quantities of profanity.
Raygun provides a window into how users are really experiencing your software applications.
Every now and then, you come across a special project. You know the sort, where some business user decides that they know exactly what they need and exactly how it should be built. They get the buy-in of some C-level shmoe by making sure that their lips have intimate knowledge of said C-level butt. Once they have funding, they have people hired and begin to bark orders.
About 8 years ago, I had the privilege experience of being on such a project. When we were given the phase-I specs, all the senior tech people immediately said that there was no way to perform a sane daily backup and data-roll for the next day. The response was "We're not going to worry about backups and daily book-rolls until later". We all just cringed, made like good little HPCs and followed our orders to march onward.
A few years back, JSON crossed the “really good hammer” threshold. It has a good balance of being human readable, relatively compact, and simple to parse. It thus has become the go-to format for everything. “KoHHeKT” inherited a service which generates some JSON from an in-memory tree structure. This is exactly the kind of situation where JSON shines, and it would be trivial to employ one of the many JSON serialization libraries available for C# to generate JSON on demand.
Orrrrr… you could use LINQ aggregations, string formatting and trims…
After working mind-numbing warehouse jobs for several years, Jesse was ready for a fresh start in Information Technology. The year 2015 brought him a newly-minted Computer and Networking Systems degree from Totally Legit Technical Institute. It would surely help him find gainful employment, all he had to do was find the right opportunity.
Seeking the right opportunity soon turned in to any opportunity. Jesse came across a posting for an IT Systems Administrator that piqued his interest but the requirements and responsibilities left a lot to be desired. They sought someone with C++ and Microsoft Office experience who would perform "General IT Admin Work" and "Other Duties as assigned". None of those things seemed to fit together, but he applied anyway.
David G. wrote, "For once, I'm glad to see technical issues being presented in a technical way."
We always like to change things up a little bit here at TDWTF, and thanks to our sponsor Raygun, we've got a chance to bring you a little treat, or at least something a little different.
We're back with a new podcast, but this one isn't a talk show or storytelling format, or even a radio play. Remy rounded up some of the best comedians in Pittsburgh who were also in IT, and bundled them up to do some improv, using articles from our site and real-world IT news as inspiration. It's… it's gonna get weird.
Sometimes, you learn something new, and you suddenly start seeing it show up anywhere. The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is the name for that. Sometimes, you see one kind of bad code, and the same kind of bad code starts showing up everywhere. Yesterday we saw a nasty attempt to use bitmasks in a loop.
Today, we have Michele’s contribution, of a strange way of interacting with bitmasks. The culprit behind this code was a previous PLC programmer, even if this code wasn’t running straight on the PLC.
The “for-case” or “loop-switch” anti-pattern creates some hard to maintain code. You know the drill: the first time through the loop, do one step, the next time through the loop, do a different step. It’s known as the “Anti-Duff’s Device”, which is a good contrast: Duff’s Device is a clever way to unroll a loop and turn it into a sequential process, while the “loop-switch” takes a sequential process and turns it into a loop.
Ashlea inherited an MFC application. It was worked on by a number of developers in Germany, some of which used English to name identifiers, some which used German, creating a new language called “Deunglish”. Or “Engleutch”? Whatever you call it, Ashlea has helpfully translated all the identifiers into English for us.
Oliver Smith sends this representative line:
Apr 18
bool long_name_that_maybe_distracted_someone()
{
return (execute() ? CONDITION_SUCCESS : CONDITION_FAILURE);
}"On occasion, SQL Server Management Studio's estimates can be just a little bit off," writes Warrent B.
Lucio Crusca was doing a bit of security auditing when he found this pile of code, and it is indeed a pile. It is PHP, which doesn’t automatically make it bad, but it makes use of a feature of PHP so bad that they’ve deprecated it in recent versions: the create_function method.
Before we even dig into this code, the create_function method takes a string, runs eval on it, and returns the name of the newly created anonymous function. Prior to PHP 5.3.0 this was their method of doing lambdas. And while the function is officially deprecated as of PHP 7.2.0… it’s not removed. You can still use it. And I’m sure a lot of code probably still does. Like this block…
The first day of a new job is always an adjustment. There's a fine line between explaining that you're unused to a procedure and constantly saying "At my old company...". After all, nobody wants to be that guy, right? So you proceed with caution, trying to learn before giving advice.
But some things warrant the extra mile. When Samantha started her tenure at a mid-sized firm, it all started out fine. She got a computer right away, which is a nice plus. She met the team, got settled into a desk, and was given a list of passwords and important URLs to get situated. The usual stuff.
For decades, I worked in an industry where you were never allowed to say no to a user, no matter how ridiculous the request. You had to suck it up and figure out a way to deliver on insane requests, regardless of the technical debt they inflicted.
There’s a phenomenon I think of as the “evolution of objects” and it impacts novice programmers. They start by having piles of variables named things like userName0, userName1, accountNum0, accountNum1, etc. This is awkward and cumbersome, and then they discover arrays. string* userNames, int[] accountNums. This is also awkward and cumbersome, and then they discover hash maps, and can do something like Map<string, string>* users. Most programmers go on to discover “wait, objects do that!”
Not so Brian’s co-worker, Dagny. Dagny wanted to write some C++, but didn’t want to learn that pesky STL or have to master templates. Dagny also considered themselves a “performance junkie”, so they didn’t want to bloat their codebase with peer-reviewed and optimized code, and instead decided to invent that wheel themselves.
"No thanks, I'm holding out for version greater than or equal to 3.6 before upgrading," writes Geoff G.
Oh, dates. Oh, dates in Java. They’re a bit of a dangerous mess, at least prior to Java 8. That’s why Java 8 created its own date-time libraries, and why JodaTime was the gold standard in Java date handling for many years.
But it doesn’t really matter what date handling you do if you’re TRWTF. An Anonymous submitter passed along this method, which is meant to set the start and end date of a search range, based on a number of days:
Every programming language has a *bias* which informs their solutions. Object-oriented languages are biased towards objects, and all the things which follow on. Clojure is all about function application. Haskell is all about type algebra. Ruby is all about monkey-patching existing objects.
In any language, these things can be taken too far. Java's infamous Spring framework leaps to mind. Perl, being biased towards regular expressions, has earned its reputation as being "write only" thanks to regex abuse.
Requirements. That magical set of instructions that tell you specifically what you need to build and test. Users can't be bothered to write them, and even if they could, they have no idea how to tell you what they want. It doesn't help that many developers are incapable of following instructions since they rarely exist, and when they do, they usually aren't worth the coffee-stained napkin upon which they're scribbled.
That said, we try our best to build what we think our users need. We attempt to make it fairly straightforward to use what we build. The button marked Reports most likely leads to something to do with generating/reading/whatever-ing reports. Of course, sometimes a particular feature is buried several layers deep and requires multiple levels of ribbons, menus, sub-menus, dialogs, sub-dialogs and tabs before you find the checkbox you want. Since us developers as a group are, by nature, somewhat anal retentive, we try to keep related features grouped so that you can generally guess what path to try to find something. And we often supply a Help feature to tell you how to find it when you can't.
