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A single line of code from a large application that somehow manages to provide an almost endless insight into the pain that its maintainers face each day.
Reader Jeremy sends us this baffling JavaScript: "Nobody on the team knows how it came to be. We think all 'they' wanted was a sequence of numbers starting at 1, but you wouldn't really know that from the code."
Tim W caught a ticket. The PHP system he inherited allowed users to upload files, and then would process those files. It worked… most of the time. It seemed like a Heisenbug. Logging was non-existent, documentation was a fantasy, and to be honest, no one was exactly 100% certain what the processing feature was supposed to do- but whatever it was doing now was the right thing, except the times that it wasn’t right.
Specifically, some files got processed. Some files didn’t. They all were supposed to.
Nov 17