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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;
}
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.
I'm a JSON curmudgeon, in that I think that its type-system, inherited from JavaScript, is bad. It's a limited vocabulary of types, and it forces developers to play odd games of convention. For example, because it lacks any sort of date type, you either have to explode your date out as a sub-dictionary (arguably, the "right" approach) or do what most people do- use an ISO formatted string as your date. The latter version requires you to attempt to parse the sting to validate the data, but validating JSON is a whole thing anyway.
But, enough about me being old and cranky. Do you know one type JSON supports? Boolean values.
Today's anonymous submitter spent a few weeks feeling pretty good about themselves. You see, they'd inherited a gigantic and complex pile of code, an application spread out across 15 backend servers, theoretically organized into "modules" and "microservices" but in reality was a big ball of mud. And after a long and arduous process, they'd dug through that ball of mud and managed to delete 190 files, totaling 30,000 lines of code. That was fully 2/3rds of the total codebase, gone- and yet the tests continued to pass, the application continued to run, and everyone was just much happier with it.
Two weeks later, a new ticket comes in: users are getting a 403 error when trying to access the "User Update" screen. Our submitter has seen a lot of these tickets, and it almost always means that the user's permissions are misconfigured. It's an easy fix, and not a code problem.