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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.
Aug 24while(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.