Recent Representative Line

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.

Mar 2020

hnjbbbbynbhhhhhhhhhhhh

by in Representative Line on

Five years ago, someone at Adam’s company made a commit. Like all good commits, it touched 200 individual files and 3,500 lines of code, and the commit message was simply: “Fixed”.

One of those 200 files was a .h header file, declaring a long pile of function prototypes. One of them is this one. It has no implementation, and isn’t used anywhere:


Three's a Constant

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Bryant E was debugging a hardware system with some embedded C code. Due to form factor considerations, there weren't a lot of physical inputs to this device, which meant what controls it had needed to be reused cleverly.

For example, there was a pushbutton. Just pushing it performed one function. Press-and-hold did another. Double click and triple click did yet more functions.