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Code Snippet Of the Day (CodeSOD) features interesting and usually incorrect code snippets taken from actual production code in a commercial and/or open source software projects.
Before Chris W. took a stab at optimizing the below code, it had been a pain in the neck of his employer for a looong time.
Running in a call center, it loops through agents stored in a database table, queries their queues and the skills on the queue. It then inserts a record in another table for each combination.
"I recently was hired by a very large company as a software developer, and I couldn't wait to start," writes Philipp B, "Having mostly worked for small shops, this seemed like a great opportunity to see how large teams of developers build and maintain complex business applications."
"It turned out to be quite the opportunity. Databases? Naaah... just use a bunch of XML (or sometimes CSV) files. Deployments? Naaah... just copy the project files (including the source code) to the 'wwwroot' folder on the web server. Architecture... definitely! Copy/paste is a pattern, right?" One thing that was common was the vast amount of code to do seemingly simple things. For example, determine whether Yes ('ja') or No ('nein') should be displayed on a report."
“For the past six months,” Jose C writes, “I’ve been struggling with our vendor – let’s call them ‘Enterprise Associates’ – to get the source code for the Enterprise module of their ‘Enterprise ERP for Enterprises’ software. Now we normally don’t expect source code from vendor software, but this was specifically in our contract. Partially because they wrote it on our dime, but mostly because we needed to do some serious customization to make it work.”
“They delivered excuse after excuse after excuse, but they all were something like, ‘we are still ensuring our code meets Enterprise Associates release standards and that it is fully documented and supportable by our Enterprise support team.’ And then finally, it came.”
When Mike's manager asked if he'd like to take a stab at doing some maintenance on the Freight Calculator, naturally, he agreed.
After all, like many manager requests, it's not like he really had a choice in the matter, though Mike sorely wished that he did. The Freight Calculator, a MS Access/VBA "app", was previously maintained by a former fellow developer named Trent who had moved on to supposedly greener pastures a few weeks earlier. Like many in the department, Mike often heard Trent cursing under his breath any time he walked past so his departure was not at all unexpected. Though Trent was the only developer who had delved into the inner workings of the Freight Calculator, it already carried a reputation throughout the department as being a nightmare application to support. A reputation that Mike soon witnessed as being well earned.
Now, it wasn’t that Gary was an unlikeable person, he just had a pompous arrogant attitude that got in the way of coworkers in Jake’s workplace from getting to know the true, “hidden” Gary. A self-proclaimed “genius developer extraordinaire”, he was famous around the office for two things.
First being…pointing out how much of a genius he is! During his morning rounds, Gary would strike up a conversation about his latest round of changes saved the company untold sums of money, all the while, sprinkling in words like “instantiate” and “overload” as often and as irrelevantly as possible.
"We recently implemented the webservice interface from our vendors," Eric writes, "they're a large and generally well-respected software service firm."
"Their webservice returns SOAP messages — which is just fine — but instead of returning a useful XML string, it returns this."
Dec 10