The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Repeat and Rinse

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-11-27

The challenges of doing a national integration continue to plague Sergio. More specifically, the “solutions” left behind by his predecessors continue to annoy.

Sergio has inherited a system which needs to plug in to a national database. As the national integration was something which was added after the business processes were already determined, that means that certain terms/descriptors/captions/etc. are used internally than are required externally, and vice versa. So, for example, one laboratory test Sergio’s company performs might be called “QD1” internally, but is known by the government as “F3+”.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2019-12-15

A Very Personal Role

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-11-25

Nohemi has a program which needs to apply role-based security. Due to their organizational needs, the rules for role names are a bit unusual. Some roles have to be a case-insensitive match. But some roles have a more flexible pattern they need to have. This is how her co-worker implemented this:

    public static String decodeRole(String role) {
        String decodedRole = "";
        if (role != null && !role.trim().equals("")) {
            if (role.trim().equalsIgnoreCase(ROLE_1_STRING))
                decodedRole = CODE_ROLE_1;
            else if (role.trim().equalsIgnoreCase(ROLE_2_STRING))
                decodedRole = CODE_ROLE_2;
            else if (role.trim().equalsIgnoreCase(ROLE_3_STRING))
                decodedRole = CODE_ROLE_3;
            else if (personalContains(role.trim(), ROLE_4_STRING))
                decodedRole = CODE_ROLE_4;
        }
        return decodedRole;
    }

29 comments - Last comment @ 2019-12-04

Never Refuse a Fifth

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-11-19

Sometimes, you want your dates to look like this: 3/3/2019. Other times, you want them to look like this: 03/03/2019.

There are plenty of wrong ways to do this. There are far fewer right ways to do it, and they mostly boil down to “use your language’s date library.”

19 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-25

Sorting Out a Late Night

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-11-14

Karl’s trials of crunch (previously) didn’t end with a badly written brain-fart. After too many consecutive late nights, Karl noticed that their grid layout was wrong.

It did this:

Alpha	Beta
Delta	Gamma

19 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-19

Assert Yourself

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-11-12

Chris V does compliance testing. This often means they trace through logic in code to ensure that very specific conditions about the code’s behavior and logic are met. This creates unusual situations, where they might have access to specific and relevant pieces of code, but not the entire codebase. If they spot something unusual, but not within the boundaries of their compliance tests, they just pass on by it.

One of the C++ code bases Chris had to go through featured this “defensive” pattern everywhere.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-19

One Way to Solve a Bug

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-11-11

Startups go through a number of phases, and one specific phase is the transition from "just get it done and worry about the consequences tomorrow" into "wait, maybe if we actually did some planning and put some process around what we do, we won't constantly be one step behind the current disaster."

And that's when they start to hire people who have more management experience, but are also technical enough that they can contribute to the product directly. At BK's company, the latest hire in that category is Sylvester.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-25

Overlapping Complexity

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2019-11-07

After his boss left the company, Joel C was promoted to team lead. This meant that Joel was not only responsible for their rather large production codebase, but also for interviewing new potential team members. There are a ton of coding questions that one can ask in a technical interview, and Joel figured he should ask one that they actually solve in their application: given two unordered sets of timestamps, calculate how much overlap (if any) is between the two series.

If you think about it for a minute, it's really quite simple: first, find the minimum and maximum values for each set to get the start and end times (e.g. [01:08:01,01:09:55] and [01:04:11,01:09:42]). Then, subtract the later start time (01:08:01) from the earlier end time (01:09:42) to get the overlap (01:09:42 - 01:08:01 = 00:01:41). A non-positive result would indicate there's no overlap (such as 12:00:04 - 13:11:43), and in that case, it should probably just be zero. Or, in a single line of code:

37 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-21

A Botched Escape

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-11-04

Nancy was recently handed a pile of "modern" PHP that weighs in at tens of thousands of lines of code.

This is how every query is executed:

31 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-08

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