The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

A Profitable Education

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-11-14

Today’s anonymous submitter is an experienced Python developer. Their team is significantly less experienced. In the interests of training, someone suggested, “Perhaps we should buy books for everyone.” Our submitter was handed a stack of possible books, and asked to pick the best one to help the team mature.

One book spent some time discussing types, and the conversion between them. By way of example, it provided a handy method which would turn a string into a floating point number:

24 comments - Last comment @ 17:06

An Equal Crunch

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2018-11-13

Rina works in an environment which tends to favor crunch. It's a bit of a feast or famine situation, where they'll coast for months on a pretty standard 9-5 schedule, and then bam, suddenly it's 18 hours days.

No one particularly likes those periods, and code quality takes a nosedive. Co-worker Rusty, though, starts making utterly bizarre decisions when stressed, which is how Rina found this line while doing a code review:

30 comments - Last comment @ 13:37

To Round a Corner

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-11-12

Last week we saw an attempt to reinvent the ceil function. Tina raised a protest: "6 lines to re-implement a ceil function? We can do better."

//Rounds to 1000d Superior
public int round1000dSup(int value_To_Round) {
    int finalResult = 0;
    int resultIntermediate = value_To_Round / 1000;
    resultIntermediate += 1;
    int valueRounded = resultIntermediate * 1000;
    if ((valueRounded - value_To_Round) == 1000) {
        finalResult = value_To_Round;
    } else {
        finalResult = valueRounded;
    }
    return finalResult;
}

12 comments - Last comment @ 2018-11-12

A Swift Update

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-11-08

Banks are uniquely identified via a “SWIFT Code”. It’s an ISO Standard. Having an accurate SWIFT code for a given bank is of vital importance to anyone doing financial transactions. With mergers, moves, new branches, and so on, the SWIFT codes you do business with won’t change often, but they will change.

Thus, Philip wasn’t terribly surprised when he got a request to update a pile of SWIFT codes. He couldn’t make the change via the database, though, as no one had permission to do that. He couldn’t edit it through an application UI, because no one had ever built one.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2018-11-12

Hitting Your Skill Ceiling

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-11-07

Clia was handed a pile of legacy code and told to upgrade it, but with a very important rule attached: the functionality couldn't change. Any change could break someone's workflow, and thus in the upgraded system, even the bugs had to be reproduced.

Unlike most "legacy" code, this wasn't all that old- it was written in C#. Then again, C# is old enough to drive, so maybe it is old. Regardless, C# has utility methods, like, say, a ceil function. At no point in C#'s history has it lacked this basic functionality.

34 comments - Last comment @ 2018-11-10

Enterprising Messages

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2018-11-06

Percy's employer is an "enterprise vendor". They have a variety of products all within the "enterprise" space. Like most enterprise products, they're sold on the strength of the marketing team's ability to claim with a straight face that they're secure, robust, reliable, and performant.

While the company offered a "cloud" solution for their enterprise suite, the real money was in the on premises version. With on-prem, any updates or upgrades were almost guaranteed to break the entire environment unless the customer shoveled huge piles of cash at the company to get a specialist to come out and do the upgrades.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2018-11-09

For a Long While

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-11-01

Here’s a philosophical question. Let’s say you’re searching an array. Is it clearer to use a for loop and break when you find the element, or is it better to use a while loop and break if you hit the end of the array?

Most of us would likely use the for loop, but it wouldn’t be wrong to use the while- maybe just unexpected.

37 comments - Last comment @ 2018-11-07

A Tern at the Build Process

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-10-29

Justin Self inherited an internal build tool. Rome may not have been built in a day, but this tool was. It “simplifies” provisioning development environments, claiming machines in the environment for certain tasks, and so on.

(e.BuildStatus == null ? 
    (e.Branch == null ? "" : ($"\nBranch: <{e.BranchUrl}|{e.Branch}>")) :
    ($"\n{(e.BuildStatus == "Building" ? "Building" : e.BuildStatus == "Success" ?
    $"Built" : "Build failed")}: <{(e.BuildStatus == "Success" ? 
    e.BuildReleaseUrl : e.BuildUrl)}|{e.BuildRelease}>") + 
    $"{GetCardUrl(e.Branch)}") +
    $"\n{(e.DeployStatus == "Deploying" ? 
    "Deploying" : e.DeployStatus == "Success" ? 
    "Deployed" : "Deploy failed")}: 
    <{e.DeployUrl}|{e.DeployRelease}>{GetCardUrl(e.DeployRelease)}"

29 comments - Last comment @ 2018-11-08