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Seeing that I somehow neglected to publish an article yesterday, I figured today would be a great day for a big ole smorgasbord of interesting code. Enjoy!
"I found the following code in our core architecture library," Steven writes, "I could make a smart-ass comment about needing a reference to get a reference, but I think the code speaks for itself."
Back in the days of the first Internet Bubble, Tom received a call from his colleague Steve. They were both contractors, working for the same elite contracting company, and Steve had run into a problem with a Perl script he couldn't figure out. Tom, being a bit more experienced in the arcane art of Perl, was confident he could help out.
The Perl script had started out as a quick hack by an in-house developer, and was little more than a simple CGI script that managed the company's website account database. Apparently, it had run "instantly" many months back, but as of late, it was seeing heavy use and taking a few minutes to run. Worse, it was "occasionally" losing data. And by occasionally, I mean most of the time: it'd typically took an a good three or four attempts to create an account or change a password.
The Discothèque Option (from Tony Kollias)
Working in Europe, where English is often a second language, we often get some interesting support calls. One of my favorite is from a few years back, where a user was having a problem with her internet connection dropping every few minutes.
After spending a good fifteen minutes diagnosing and checking things on my end, I was unable to see anything that would have caused the problem. Even the logfiles – which detail unexpected connection drops – were clean. Nothing seemed to be the problem.
"One of the first things I like to do when working a new contract is dive into the code and work my way around to understand it," Emil wrote, "one line of code that looked like a good start was this."
Aug 10
private ISelecteVariableProperties[] Iselecvariablelst
= new ISelecteVariableProperties[ 7 ];
Passwords are a very special type of string. When you type your password into an input box, a • appears instead of the letter you typed. They’ll often contain characters that are really hard to type (like the ~ symbol), and when they get put into a database they’re sometimes encrypted with some sort of “hash”. Plus, passwords can even get too old and expire.
Indeed, strings that are this special need special handling. At least, that’s what Pavel’s colleague must have been thinking when he developed this method and included into the company's common code library.
The Test Machine seemed a bit out of place as it sat there, nestled between cubicles in Christophe’s office. Actually, calling it a “test machine” seemed a bit inappropriate, too, much like calling an aircraft carrier a boat, or referring to a house mover as simply a truck. It was huge – no less than seven feet tall, four feet wide, and three feet deep – and weighed a solid ton or two. This marvelous machine was as modern as it was massive, sporting several state-of-the-art computers, power supplies, instruments, relays, ignition coils, fuel injectors, and everything else one might need to test automotive electronic control units (ECUs).
In those days, ECUs were becoming exponentially more complex with the integration of microprocessors, real-time processing, and communication between other ECUs. And as a result, testing individual and networked ECUs was becoming exponentially more complex. Christophe’s company, however, promised a unique solution: software-driven automated testing to validate the virtually endless combinations and permutations of input conditions that exist while operating a vehicle.
Noah Finkelstein's coworker Dave was a strange fellow. When he wasn't mumbling to himself in his cubicle, he could be found in deep thought at the snack machine, pondering whether to get animal crackers or Lorna Doones. He'd always get the Lorna Doones, but swear that next time, he'd go for the animal crackers. And everyone was well aware of this, as it was one of the few things the socially-awkward programmer would talk about.
One day, Dave approached Noah with a rather odd question: he wondered if there was a way to un-commit a file in subversion. Puzzled at the request, Noah explained that he could just rollback to a previously committed version, which would effectively un-commit the change. "No, no, no," Dave said in a more-flustered-than-usual tone, "I know that, but I need to get rid of the old version."
Like virtually all modern languages, C# has a built-in Boolean data type. This means that the only values eligible for variables of that data type are true and false, and unfortunately not FILE_NOT_FOUND. In addition, all data types in C# have a ToString() method, which does just that; for Booleans, it returns the appropriate of the two constants System.Boolean.TrueString or System.Boolean.FalseString.
So given that (which, you probably already knew anyway), how would you convert a Boolean to its string representation? If, like Malcolm colleague, you answered the following, give yourself a point!
The Best (from Chris)
A while back, I helped interview for a programmer position on the web team. After talking to a number of candidates, we finally settled on an older gentlemen, probably in his late 50s. It wasn't an easy decision. Not only were his salary requirements above what we planned to pay, he had a few personality quirks. For example, a large part of his interview entailed him describing how he was a master composer of music, and had published songs in nearly every genre, including country, rap, pop, etc. But no matter, his experience and technical skills were top-notch.
After making an offer that met his salary requirements, the candidate made a counter offer: fifteen-thousand dollars more annually plus a signing bonus. Unfortunately, our budget couldn't accommodate that, and we declined. Negotiations after that failed, so we formally rescinded the offer for employment so we could talk to more candidates.
"I was recently assigned to work on a team that maintains a fairly large product," writes Aaron, "at first, I was a bit overwhelmed by the complexity of the architecture. There were countless layers of abstraction, thousands and thousands of classes, and design patterns galore. Since it was such a large project – and my first large project – I figured that the architectural complexity was simply par for the course."
“Then I started looking at the code a little more closely. If I had two words to describe it, they’d be ‘unnecessary complexity.’ And if I had one snippet to describe it, it would be this.”
