The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Self Test

by TJ Mott in CodeSOD on 2016-03-10

I consider code cleanup to be important, almost as important as actually writing code, especially since I spend a lot of time doing maintenance and support. During idle time, I enjoy digging through existing code to find overcomplicated algorithms and dead code and see what I can simplify or even delete. While there may not be an immediate benefit, it makes future debugging far easier if you trim out dead code and shorten 3,000 line C files to 500 line ones. And quite often, subtle and difficult-to-diagnose bugs simply go away.

While doing this on one of our products, I found a very old public API that appears to have never been completed. At least I hope so, because there’s no way any of it does anything remotely useful.

The Swing of Things

by TJ Mott in Feature Articles on 2016-03-07

While studying Java in college, Eugene had the great misfortune of being hired by a company that specialized in Java Swing applications. (For those of you who don’t know, Swing is a cross-platform framework for desktop GUI applications.) He was quickly swept aboard a new project: taking a new client’s poorly-implemented, buggy, and unstable PHP website and upgrading it to a new, clean, Java-based version.

The team quickly stumbled into a major roadblock. “This has to be a web application?” questioned Rob, the team lead. “You can’t do web with Swing. Why don’t we just write them a Swing application?”