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Kirill writes:
I've worked in this small company for a year, and on a daily basis I've come across things that make my eyes sink back into their sockets in fear, but mostly I've been too busy fixing them to post anything. It being my last day however, here's a classic
The CEO of Delia's company retired. They were an old hand in the industry, the kind of person who worked their way up and had an engineering background, and while the staff loved them, the shareholders were less than pleased, because the company was profitable, but not obscenely so. So the next CEO was a McKinsey-approved MBA who had one mission: cut costs.
Out went the senior devs, and much of the managers. Anyone who was product or customer focused followed quickly behind. What remained were a few managers handpicked by the new CEO and a slew of junior engineers- and Pierre.
Python's "batteries included" approach means that a lot of common tasks have high-level convenience functions for them. For example, if you want to read all the lines from a file into an array (list, in Python), you could do something like:
Jan 25with open(filename) as f:
lines = f.readlines()
Most of us, when generating a UUID, will reach for a library to do it. Even a UUIDv4, which is just a random number, presents challenges: doing randomness correctly is hard, and certain bits within the UUID are reserved for metadata about what kind of UUID we're generating.
But Gretchen's co-worker didn't reach for a library. What they did reach for was… regular expressions?
There are real advantages to taking a functional programming approach to expressing problems. Well, some problems, anyway.
Kevin sends us this example of elegant, beautiful functional code in C#:
Greg was fighting with an academic CMS, and discovered that a file called write_helper.js was included on every page. It contained this single function:
function document_write(s)
{
document.write(s);
}
Gretchen saw this line in the front-end code for their website and freaked out:
let bucket = new AWS.S3({ params: { Bucket: 'initech-logos' } });
One thing I've learned by going through our reader submissions over the years is that WTFs never start with just one mistake. They're a compounding sequence of systemic failures. When we have a "bad boss" story, where an incompetent bully puts an equally incompetent sycophant in charge of a project, it's never just about the bad boss- it's about the system that put the bad boss in that position. For every "Brillant" programmer, there's a whole slew of checkpoints which should have stopped them before they went too far.
With all that in mind, today we're doing a news roundup about the worst boss of them all, the avatar of Dunning-Kruger, Elon Musk. Because over the past month, a lot has happened, and there are enough software and IT related WTFs that I need to talk about them.
Abdoullah sends us this little blob of C#, which maybe isn't a full-on WTF, but certainly made me chuckle.
if (file!= null)
{
if (file.name.StartsWith(userName))
{
if (file.name.StartsWith(userName))
{
url = string.Format(FILE_LINK, file.itemId, file.name);
break;
}
}
}
Eric writes:
Yes, we actually do have code reviews and testing practices. A version of this code was tested successfully prior to this version being merged in, somehow.
As the saying goes, there are only two hard problems in computer science: naming things, cache invalidations, and off by one errors. Chris's predecessor decided to tackle the second one, mostly by accurately(?) naming a class:
class SimpleCache
{
}
Andrew worked with Stuart. Stuart was one of those developers who didn't talk to anyone except to complain about how stupid management was, or how stupid the other developers were. Stuart was also the kind of person who would suddenly go on a tear, write three thousand lines of code in an evening, and then submit an pull request. He wouldn't respond to PR comments, however, and just wait until management needed the feature merged badly enough that someone said, "just approve it so we can move on."
int iDisplayFlags = objectProps.DisplayInfo.BackgroundPrintFlags;
bool bForceBackgroundOn = false;
bool bForceBackgroundOff = false;
// Can't use _displayTypeID because it will always be 21 since text displays as image
if (_fileTypeID == 11) // TEXT
{
if ((iDisplayFlags & 0x1008) != 0) // Text Background is required
{
bForceBackgroundOn = true;
}
else if ((iDisplayFlags & 0x1001) != 0) // Text Background is not available
{
bForceBackgroundOff = true;
}
}
else if (_displayTypeID == 21) // IMAGE
{
if ((iDisplayFlags & 0x1200) != 0) // Image Background is required
{
bForceBackgroundOn = true;
}
else if ((iDisplayFlags & 0x1040) != 0) // Image Background is not available
{
bForceBackgroundOff = true;
}
}
bool useBackground = bForceBackgroundOn;
// If an object does not have an Background and we try to use it, bad things happen.
// So we check to see if we really have an Background, if not we don't want to try and use it
if (!useBackground && objectProps.DisplayInfo.Background)
{
useBackground = Convert.ToBoolean(BackgroundShown);
}
if (bForceBackgroundOff)
{
useBackground = false;
}
I know we've discussed this in the past, but it's always worth visiting Visual Basic's error handling approach. Not Visual Basic .Net, which adopts the common try/catch approach, but classic VB, which had two options.
The first was On Error Goto LABEL, which lets you jump to an error handler using a goto. The second was On Error Resume Next which does nothing when you get an error, leaving you to check return codes to see if there were any errors.
Sammy's company "jumped on the Ruby on Rails bandwagon since there was one on which to jump", and are still very much a Rails shop. The company has been around for thirty years, and in that time has seen plenty of ups and downs. During one of those "ups", management decided they needed to scale up, both in terms of staffing and in terms of client base- so they hired an offshore team to promote international business and add to their staffing.
A "down" followed not long after, and the offshore team was disbanded. So Sammy inherited the code.
Tim has been working on a large C++ project which has been around for many, many years. It's a tool built for, in Tim's words, "an esoteric field", and most of the developers over the past 30 years have been PhD students.
This particular representative line is present with its original whitespace, and the original variable names. It has been in the code base since 2010.
There are a lot of cases where the submission is "this was server side generated JavaScript and they were loading constants". Which, honestly, is a WTF, but it isn't interesting code. Things like this:
if (false === true)
{
// do stuff
}
Just because you get fired doesn't mean that your pull requests are automatically closed. Dallin was in the middle of reviewing a PR by Steve when the email came out announcing that Steve no longer worked at the company.
Let's take a look at that PR, and maybe we can see why.