snoofle

After surviving 35 years, dozens of languages, hundreds of projects, thousands of meetings and millions of LOC, I now teach the basics to the computer-phobic

Jun 2014

Rolling Your Own

by in CodeSOD on

We've all seen folks reinvent the wheel. Some folks reinvent booleans. Others don't know when to stop. Some treat time as though it were malleable. Still others have all sorts of trouble finding dates.

However, Nathan encountered some code where folks seemed even more determined than usual not to use the built-in features of the language.


The System

by in Feature Articles on

One of J.W.'s clients called him in to help diagnose and fix some reliability problems with the deployment system. The client was a small shop of about ten developers, one dual-role QA/manager, one SA who controlled the QA and production machines, and the requisite bean counters.

Upon arrival, J.W. was proudly shown the home-grown system that the manager had cobbled together. The developers would fill out a wiki page template for each release. The template had a section for:


Extra Boolean

by in CodeSOD on
Stuart:  Oooh Sheldon, I'm afraid you couldn't be more wrong.
Sheldon: More wrong? Wrong is an absolute state and not subject to gradation.
Stuart:  Of course it is. It's a little wrong to say a tomato is a vegetable; 
         it's very wrong to say it's a suspension bridge.
-- BBT

Kristian works in a shop with a bunch of superstar developers who always seem to find interesting ways to solve what most folks might otherwise consider to be trivial design issues. One particularly brightly shining piece of engineering involved a home-grown enum table in their database. Apparently, true, false and perhaps even FILE_NOT_FOUND weren't enough for these developers. No, they needed something that could handle gradations of right and wrong; true and false. They needed something that could handle situations where something was really true or really false. Something that was a bit more than boolean...