Recent Articles

Aug 2019

Resistant to Change

by in Error'd on

Tom H. writes, "They got rid of their old, outdated fax machine, but updating their website? Yeah, that might take a while."

12 comments - Last comment @ 2024-11-10

Bassackwards Compatibility

by in CodeSOD on

A long time ago, you built a web service. It was long enough ago that you chose XML as your serialization format. It worked fine, but before long, customers started saying that they’d really like to use JSON, so now you need to expose a slightly different, JSON-powered version of your API. To make it easy, you release a JSON client developers can drop into their front-ends.

Conor is one of those developers, and while examining the requests the client sent, he discovered a unique way of making your XML web-service JSON-friendly.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2019-09-09

Teleported Release

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Matt works at an accounting firm, as a data engineer. He makes reports for people who don’t read said reports. Accounting firms specialize in different areas of accountancy, and Matt’s firm is a general firm with mid-size clients.

The CEO of the firm is a legacy from the last century. The most advanced technology on his desk is a business calculator and a pencil sharpener. He still doesn’t use a cellphone. But he does have a son, who is “tech savvy”, which gives the CEO a horrible idea of how things work.

33 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-22

Yesterday's Enterprise

by in CodeSOD on

I bumped into a few co-workers (and a few readers- that was a treat!) at Abstractions last week. My old co-workers informed me that the mainframe system, which had been “going away any day now” since about 1999, had finally gone away, as of this year.

A big part of my work at that job had been about running systems in parallel with the mainframe in some fashion, which meant I made a bunch of “datapump” applications which fed data into or pulled data out of the mainframe. Enterprise organizations often don’t know what their business processes are: the software which encodes the process is older than most anyone working in the organization, and it must work that way, because that’s the process (even though no one knows why).

22 comments - Last comment @ 2019-09-03

Checksum Yourself Before you Wrecksum Yourself

by in CodeSOD on

Mistakes happen. Errors crop up. Since we know this, we need to defend against it. When it comes to things like account numbers, we can make a rule about which numbers are valid by using a checksum. A simple checksum might be, "Add the digits together, and repeat until you get a single digit, which, after modulus with a constant, must be zero." This means that most simple data-entry errors will result in an invalid account number, but there's still a nice large pool of valid numbers to draw from.

James works for a company that deals with tax certificates, and thus needs to generate numbers which meet a similar checksum rule. Unfortunately for James, this is how his predecessor chose to implement it:

18 comments - Last comment @ 2019-09-27

One Size Fits All

by in Error'd on

"Multi-platform AND multi-gender! Who knew SSDs could be so accomodating?" Felipe C. wrote.

13 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-26

Keeping Busy

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Djungarian Hamster Pearl White run wheel

In 1979, Argle was 18, happy to be working at a large firm specializing in aerospace equipment. There was plenty of opportunity to work with interesting technology and learn from dozens of more senior programs—well, usually. But then came the day when Argle's boss summoned him to his cube for something rather different.

49 comments - Last comment @ 2024-09-27

Unstrung Manager

by in Coded Smorgasbord on

Deon was on a contract-to-hire job. In the beginning, it sounded like a good job. Then he looked at the C# codebase. It didn’t take him long to decide that this wasn’t going to be a job he’d work at full time. Still, he’d be happy to continue contracting, because it was quite obvious that it would be a lot of billable hours.

How many is “a lot”? Well, let’s talk about their StringManager class. A common WTF is a “god” class that does a thousand different things. Here’s a class made up of nothing but static functions which is 1800 lines long. This wasn’t assembled by a junior developer or an intern, but their senior technical lead, who was adamant that this was the right way to program, and god damn anybody who said otherwise.

44 comments - Last comment @ 2021-01-06

I'm Sooooooo Random, LOL

by in CodeSOD on

There are some blocks of code that require a preamble, and an explanation of the code and its flow. Often you need to provide some broader context.

Sometimes, you get some code like Wolf found, which needs no explanation:

31 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-26

Lowest Bidder Squared

by in Feature Articles on

Stack of coins 0214

Initech was in dire straits. The website was dog slow, and the budget had been exceeded by a factor of five already trying to fix it. Korbin, today's submitter, was brought in to help in exchange for decent pay and an office in their facility.

34 comments - Last comment @ 2019-09-04

What About the Fish?

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"On the one hand, I don't want to know what the fish has to do with Boris Johnson's love life...but on the other hand I have to know!" Mark R. writes.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-20

A Devil With a Date

by in CodeSOD on

Jim was adding a feature to the backend. This feature updated a few fields on an object, and then handed the object off as JSON to the front-end.

Adding the feature seemed pretty simple, but when Jim went to check out its behavior in the front-end, he got validation errors. Something in the data getting passed back by his web service was fighting with the front end.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-18

A Loop in the String

by in CodeSOD on

Robert was browsing through a little JavaScript used at his organization, and found this gem of type conversion.

//use only for small numbers
function StringToInteger (str) {
    var int = -1;
    for (var i=0; i<=100; i++) {
        if (i+"" == str) {
            int = i;
            break;
        }
    }
    return int;
}
38 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-18

Nullable Knowledge

by in CodeSOD on

You’ve got a decimal value- maybe. It could be nothing at all, and you need to handle that null gracefully. Fortunately for you, C# has “nullable types”, which make this task easy.

Ian P’s co-worker made this straightforward application of nullable types.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2019-09-06

Internship of Things

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Mindy was pretty excited to start her internship with Initech's Internet-of-Things division. She'd been hearing at every job fair how IoT was still going to be blowing up in a few years, and how important it would be for her career to have some background in it.

It was a pretty standard internship. Mindy went to meetings, shadowed developers, did some light-but-heavily-supervised changes to the website for controlling your thermostat/camera/refrigerator all in one device.

31 comments - Last comment @ 2020-10-20

Intentionally Obtuse

by in Error'd on

"Normally I do pretty well on the Super Quiz, but then they decided to do it in Latin," writes Mike S.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-12

Swimming Downstream

by in CodeSOD on

When Java added their streams API, they brought the power and richness of functional programming styles to the JVM, if we ignore all the other non-Java JVM languages that already did this. Snark aside, streams were a great addition to the language, especially if we want to use them absolutely wrong.

Like this code Miles found.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-22

Seven First Dates

by in CodeSOD on

Your programming language is PHP, which represents datetimes as milliseconds since the epoch. Your database, on the other hand, represents datetimes as seconds past the epoch. Now, your database driver certainly has methods to handle this, but can you really trust that?

Nancy found some code which simply needs to check: for the past week, how many customers arrived each day?

18 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-12

Bunny Bunny

by in CodeSOD on

When you deploy any sort of complicated architecture, like microservices, you also end up needing to deploy some way to route messages between all the various bits and bobs in your application. You could build this yourself, but you’ll usually use an off-the-shelf product, like Kafka or RabbitMQ.

This is the world Tina lives in. They have a microservice-based architecture, glued together with a RabbitMQ server. The various microservices need to connect to the RabbitMQ, and thus, they need to be able to check if that connection were successful.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-14

A Truly Painful Exchange

by in CodeSOD on

Java has a boolean type, and of course it also has a parseBoolean method, which works about how you'd expect. It's worth noting that a string "true" (ignoring capitalization) is the only thing which is considered true, and all other inputs are false. This does mean that you might not always get the results you want, depending on your inputs, so you might need to make your own boolean parser.

Adam H has received the gift of legacy code. In this case, the code was written circa 2002, and the process has been largely untouched since. An outside vendor uploads an Excel spreadsheet to an FTP site. And yes, it must be FTP, as the vendor's tool won't do anything more modern, and it must be Excel because how else do you ship tables of data between two businesses?

45 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-16

Choice is but an Illusion

by in Error'd on

"If you choose not to decide which button to press, you still have made a choice," Rob H. wrote.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-14

Close to the Point

by in CodeSOD on

Lena inherited some C++ code which had issues regarding a timeout. While skimming through the code, one block in particular leapt out. This was production code which had been running in this state for some time.

if((pFile) && (pFile != (FILE *)(0xcdcdcdcd))) {
    fclose(pFile);
    pFile = NULL;
}
39 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-14
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