The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Abstractions II: Pittsburgh Boogaloo

by Remy Porter in Announcements on 2019-05-24

I’ve been a big fan of the work Code and Supply has been doing for years, with their focus on building a community for developers, starting in Pittsburgh and expanding their sights. We’ve co-sponsored a number of events, and I’ve personally found jobs and made friends through the organization.

Their first Abstractions conference, in 2016, was easily one of the best conferences I’ve seen, and they’re bringing it back for 2019.

1 comments - Last comment @ 11:47

Do Fiasco

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-05-22

Consuela works with a senior developer who has been with the company since its founding, has the CEO’s ear, and basically can do anything they want.

These days, what they want to do is code entirely locally on their machine, hand the .NET DLL off to Consuela for deployment, and then complain that their fancy code is being starved for hardware resources.

38 comments - Last comment @ 07:52

Tern Failure into a Success

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-05-21

Oliver Smith stumbled across a small but surprising bug when running some automated tests against a mostly clean code-base. Specifically, they were trying to break things by playing around with different compiler flags and settings. And they did, though in a surprising case.

bool long_name_that_maybe_distracted_someone()
{
  return (execute() ? CONDITION_SUCCESS : CONDITION_FAILURE);
}

23 comments - Last comment @ 06:20

Destroying the Environment

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2019-05-20

Andrew H sends a line that isn't, on its own, terribly horrifying.

Utilities.isTestEnvironment = !"prd".equals(environment);

25 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-22

True Confession: Without a Map

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-05-16

Today, we have the special true confession from Bruce, who wrote some bad code, but at least knows it’s bad.

Bruce is a C# developer. Bruce is not a web developer. Someone around the office, though, had read an article about how TypeScript was closer to “real” languages, like C#, and asked Bruce to do some TypeScript work.

35 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-23

Transport Layer Stupidity

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-05-14

Keith H’s boss came by his cube.

“Hey, you know how our insurance quote site has TLS enabled by default?”

29 comments - Last comment @ 12:47

The National Integration

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-05-13

Sergio works for a regional public administration. About a decade ago, the national government passed some laws or made some regulations, and then sent a software package to all the regional administrations. This software package was built to aggregate reports from the local databases into a single, unified, consistent interface on a national website.

Of course, each regional group did things their own way, so the national software package needed to be customized to work. Also, each regional administration had their own reporting package which already did some of this, and which they liked better, because they already knew how it worked. In the case of Sergio's employer, even more important: their organization's logo was prominently displayed.

35 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-18

What For?

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-05-09

Pretty much every language has many ways to do loops/iteration. for and while and foreach and do while and function application and recursion and…

It’s just too many. Mike inherited some code which cleans up this thicket of special cases for iteration and just uses one pattern to solve every iteration problem.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-15