The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

A Blacklisted Senior

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-02-27

Damien has the “pleasure” of supporting JavaScript code which runs, not in a browser or Node, but inside of a proprietary runtime specialized in handling high-performance collection datatypes. You can write extremely fast code, so long as you’re using the collection types correctly. This is good, because a lot of those JavaScript blocks have to be executed for every single request. Milliseconds of execution time add up faster than you think.

One of Damien’s senior peers needed to add some code that would filter fields out of a response. Data fetched from the database would be compared against a blacklist of fields to exclude- those fields should be removed from the collection.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2020-03-04

Producing Self Joins

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-02-26

Wesley considers himself an “intermediate SQL-er”. The previous “database expert”, though, has moved on to greener pastures, and now Wesley is “the database person”. This means that they need to pick through a bunch of stored procedures and triggers and try and understand the undocumented, unversion-controlled database code.

The upshot, is that Wesley is starting to feel like his intermediate skills might be more “expert” than the previous expert.

37 comments - Last comment @ 2020-03-05

Break your Labels

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-02-25

Nedra writes “I discovered this code while cleaning up and refactoring some label printing methods in a home-grown ERP that I maintain.”

The code in question “works most of the time”, which means it’s crossed a line of code quality. Speaking of crossing lines, this particular block of code needs to take information about how a product is formulated and print it on a label. These sorts of ERP functions are “mission critical”, in that correct and accurate formulations- whether the ingredients list on a foodstuff or the ingredients in a can of paint, or an industrial solvent- are required for regulatory compliance.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-28

The Label Printer

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-02-24

If you create a UI object in code, you have to go through all that pesky, annoying work of initalizing that object so it displays correctly. I mean, who wants to write VB.NET code which looks like this:

Label = New Label
Label.Size = New Size(710, 300)
Label.TextLB = "Operation:"
someForm.Controls.Add(Label)

28 comments - Last comment @ 2020-03-03

It's For DIVision

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-02-20

We’ve discussed the evil of the for-case pattern in the past, but Russell F offers up a finding which is an entirely new riff on this terrible, terrible idea.

We’re going to do this is chunks, because it’s a lot of code.

31 comments - Last comment @ 2020-06-08

Legacy Documentation

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-02-17

Vernice inherited a legacy web app. By "legacy" in this case, we mean "lots of jQuery." jQuery everywhere. Nested callbacks of HTTP requests, no separation of concerns at all, just an entire blob of spaghetti code that was left out on the counter and is now stuck together as a big blob of sauceless starch. And as for documentation? There isn't any. No technical documentation. No comments. The code didn't even pretend to be self-documenting.

For the past few months, Vernice has been tasked with adding features. This generally meant that she'd find the code she thought was responsible for that section of the app, change something, see nothing happen, realize she was looking at the wrong module, try that three more times, finally find the actual code that governed that behavior, but as it turns out it had downstream dependents which broke.

30 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-24

The Powerful Parent

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-02-13

As we’ve explored recently, developers will often latch onto something they pick up in one language and carry it forward with them into others. Kerry still is working with the co-worker who has… odd ideas about how things should work. At is turns out, this developer is also a Highly Paid Consultant, which we just discussed yesterday.

The latest problem Kerry found was in a display grid. It lists off a bunch of information linked to the user’s account, and each entry on the grid has a little plus sign on it to display further details. What, exactly, appears on that grid is tied to your account. It’s also worth noting that this service has a concept of corporate accounts- a “parent” account can administer entries for all their child accounts.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-18

Install Your Package

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-02-11

I use Python a lot at work, and if you're doing anything vaguely data oriented, you want to use NumPy. I gave a talk about how much I love NumPy. It's one of the things that I automatically include in every requriements.txt because it's so goddamn useful.

Lanny supports a product which uses NumPy, which is why he was surprised to find this block:

31 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-15

Going Down to the Object Store

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-02-05

Odette’s company uses a popular video conferencing solution for browser use. In the base library, there’s a handy-dandy class called ObjectStorage, which implements an in-memory key/value store entirely in TypeScript/JavaScript.

“Wait,” you ask, “isn’t a JavaScript in-memory, key/value store just… an object? A map, if you’re being pedantic?”

21 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-11

An Accident

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-02-03

There's a very specific brand of bad code that I see from time to time, which I think of as "Oh, this poor person was permanently damaged by exposure to C." They're not writing C, but there's something about their "accent" which tells you: they learned C and didn't recover from the experience. Every reference variable can be treated like a pointer if you're insistent enough.

There are other, similarly brain-breaking languages. COBOL. PL/SQL. VBA. Programmers learn the quirks of these languages, fail to understand them, and then start writing weirdly formal, structured code in languages that aren't supposed to work that way.

39 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-11

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