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As Halloween descends upon us, mysterious emails start reaching our inbox. These plaintive missives are but the screams of the damned, encoded and sent over SMTP.
For example, someone known to us only as DBA Guy sent an email with this subject: “Silver bullet SQL scalar function built by the Ancient Ones”.
In HTML5, the data-* attributes were codified, and this is a really nice thing for building applications. They are an app-defined namespace to attach any sorts of custom data to your HTML attributes. For example, a div responsible for displaying a User object might have an attribute like <div data-user-id="5123">…</div>, which allows us to better bind our DOM to our application model. They can even be used in stylesheet selectors, so I could make a styling rule for div[data-user-id].
I’m not the only one who thinks they’re a nice feature. Eric W has a co-worker who’s come up with a very… unique way of using them. First, he has the following Django template:
Regular expressions are like one of those multi-tools: they're a knife, they're a screwdriver, they're pliers, and there's a pair of tweezers stuck in the handle. We can use them to do anything.
For example, Linda inherited a site that counted up and down votes, like Reddit, implemented in CoffeeScript. Instead of using variables or extracting the text from the DOM, this code brought regular expressions to bear.
Owen J picked up a ticket complaining that users were not seeing all of their work items. Now, these particular “work items” weren’t merely project tasks, but vital for regulatory compliance. We’re talking the kinds of regulations that have the words “criminal penalties” attached to them.
What made it even more odd was that only one user was complaining. The user knew it was odd, their ticket even said, “Other people in my department aren’t having this issue, so maybe it’s something with my account?” Owen quickly eliminated their account as a likely source of the problem, but Owen also couldn’t duplicate the bug in test.
These days, you aren’t just doing development. Your development has to be driven. Business driven. Domain driven. Test driven.
TDD is generally held up as a tool for improving developer efficiency and code quality. As it turns out, scholarly research doesn’t support that: there’s no indication that TDD has any impact at all.
Kevin did the freelance thing, developing websites for small businesses. Sometimes, they had their own IT teams that would own the site afterwards, and perform routine maintenance. In those cases, they often dictated their technical standards, like “use VB.Net with WebForms”.
Kevin took a job, delivered the site, and moved onto the next job. Years later, that company needed some new features added. They called him in to do the work. He saw some surprises in the way the code base had changed.
At the end of the lecture session, students immediately started packing up their laptops to race across campus for their next class. Andrew’s professor droned on, anyway, describing their assignment. “I’ve provided parser code,” he said, “so you can just download the datafile and use it.”
He had more to say, but no one was paying attention. Perhaps he even had a correction to the assignment- because when Andrew went to download the data file for the assignment 404ed.
Going through TDWTF inbox, I’ve built a sort of mental taxonomy of bad code. For example, there’s the kingdom of Tempus Malum: home-brew date manipulation functions, a rather profligate branch of bad code. Or the Order of Linguan Ignorans- bad code developed out of a complete ignorance of the available language features.
There’s another category that I always consider a treat. It’s related to Linguan Ignorans, but also borrows from Quaesto Ignorat (ignorant of the problem being solved): Filo Annexa, or “Knotted String”, also known as “String All the Things!”
Sep 16