Forums
We've seen so many home-brew string padding functions. And yet, there are still new ways to do this wrong. An endless supply of them. Nate, for example sent us this one.
Aug 24public static string ZeroPadString(string _value, int _length)
{
string result = "";
int zerosToAdd = _length - _value.length;
We've seen this pattern many times here:
return (someCondition) ? true : false;
Maria was hired as a consultant by a large financial institution. The institution had a large pile of ETL scripts, reports, analytics dashboards, and the like, which needed to be supported. The challenge is that everyone who wasn't a developer had built the system. Due to the vagaries of internal billing, hiring IT staff to do the work would have put it under a charge code which would have drained the wrong budget, so they just did their best.
The quality of the system wasn't particularly good, and it required a lot of manual support to actually ensure that it kept working. It was several hundred tables, with no referential integrity constraints on them, no validation rules, no concept of normalization (or de-normalization- it was strictly abnormalied tables) and mostly stringly typed data. It all sat in an MS SQL Server, and required daily manual runs of stored procedures to actually function.
Governments have a difficult relationship with cryptography. Certainly, they benefit from having secure, reliable and fast encryption. Arguably, their citizens also benefit- I would argue that being able to, say, handle online banking transactions securely is a net positive. But it creates a prisoner's dilemma: malicious individuals may conceal their activity behind encryption. From the perspective of a state authority, this is bad.
Thus, you get the regular calls for a cryptosystem which allows secure communications but also allows the state to snoop on those messages. Of course, if you intentionally weaken a cryptographic system so that some people can bypass it, you've created a system which anyone can bypass. You can't have secure encryption which also allows snooping, any more than you can have an even prime number larger than two.
Craig had been an IT manager at an immigration services company for several years, but was ready to move on. And for good reason- Craig had suffered his share of moronic helldesk nonsense and was ready to let someone else deal with it. This meant participating in interviews for his replacement.
Craig had given a rather generous three months notice, and very quickly the remaining three months were taken up with interviewing possible replacements. Each interview followed the same basic pattern: Craig would greet the candidate, escort them down to the fish-bowl style conference room in the center of the office, where a panel of interviewers ran through a mix of behavioral and technical questions. The interviews were consistently disappointing, and so they'd move on to the next candidate, hoping for an improvement.
Some time ago, Roald started an internship on a ASP .Net application. It didn't take long to find some "special" code.
public string RetrieveSessionString(string sessionName)
{
try
{
return Session[sessionName].ToString();
}
catch (NullReferenceException)
{
return null;
}
}
Anders sends us an example which isn't precisely a WTF. It's just C handling C strings. Which, I guess, when I say it that way, is a WTF.
while(modPath != NULL) {
p = strchr(modPath, ':');
if(p != NULL) {
*p++ = '\0';
}
dvModpathCreate(utSymCreate(modPath));
modPath = p;
} while(modPath != NULL);
It's not brought up frequently, but a "CodeSOD" is a "Code Sample of the Day". Martin brings us this function, entitled StringOfToday. It's in VB.Net, which, as we all know, has date formatting functions built in.
Public Function StringOfToday() As String
Dim d As New DateTime
d = Now
Dim DayString As String
If d.Day < 10 Then
DayString = "0" & d.Day.ToString
Else
DayString = d.Day.ToString
End If
Dim MonthString As String
If d.Month < 10 Then
MonthString = "0" & d.Month.ToString
Else
MonthString = d.Month.ToString
End If
Dim YearString As String = d.Year.ToString
Return YearString & MonthString & DayString
End Function
Mark worked with the kind of programmer who understood the nuances and flexibility of PHP on a level like none other. This programmer also wanted to use all of those features.
This resulted in the Base class, from which all other classes descend.
Let's say you had 6 different labels to display. There are many, many ways to solve this problem. Most of them are fine. Some of them are the dreaded loop-switch anti-pattern.
Julien unfortunately inherited one of those.
As frequently discussed here, there are scientists who end up writing a fair bit of code, but they're not software engineers. This means that the code frequently solves the problem in front of them, it often has issues.
Nancy works in a lab with a slew of data scientists, and the code she has to handle gets… problematic.
Once upon a time, a company started a large React application. Like so many such projects, the requirements were vague and poorly understood, the management didn't have any sort of plan, and the developers didn't understand the framework. Once this inevitably started to go off the rails, all the developers were fired and then contractors were brought in, because that would be "cheaper".
Spoilers: it was not. So all the contractors were fired, and a new round of hires were brought in. This time, though, they'd correct their mistakes by strictly enforcing Scrum practices to be "agile".
The number of web applications which need to generate PDFs is too damn high, in my experience. But it's a requirement which continues to exist for a variety of reasons, so we just have to accept it.
Derek was accepting of it, at least until he found this attempt to add ten lines of space between paragraphs.
Anton has the joy of doing PHP work using one of the more popular e-commerce platforms.
Now, say what you will about PHP, its absolute mess of a root namespace has a function or class for just about everything. You want to split a string? We call that explode because that's way more radical than split. Want to join a string back together? We use implode, because that's the opposite of explode.
Things weren't looking good for IniOil. It was the 1980s in the US: greed was good, anti-trust laws had been literally Borked, and financialization and mergers were eating up the energy industry. IniOil was a small fish surrounded by much larger fish, and the larger fish were hungry.
Gordon was their primary IT person. He managed a farm of VAXes and other minicomputers, which geologists used to do complicated models to predict where oil might be found. In terms of utilization, the computer room was arguably the most efficient space in the company: those computers may have been expensive, but they were burning 24/7 to find more oil to extract.
Stefan S has recently joined the ranks of software developers, having taken on his first job as a junior developer. After a few months of on-boarding with Terry, another new developer, they're now both actually getting assigned real work on tickets that deliver new functionality.
Stefan proudly pushed his first feature, complete with plenty of unit, functional, and end-to-end tests. After a little brushing up during code-review, it was merged along with a few "atta boys", and Stefan was feeling pretty good about himself.