Recent CodeSOD

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.

Aug 2020

Win By Being Last

by in CodeSOD on

I’m going to open with just one line, just one line from Megan D, before we dig into the story:

public static boolean comparePasswords(char[] password1, char[] password2)
37 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-14

Where to Insert This

by in CodeSOD on

If you run a business of any size, you need some sort of resource-management/planning software. Really small businesses use Excel. Medium businesses use Excel. Enterprises use Excel. But in addition to that, the large businesses also pay through the nose for a gigantic ERP system, like Oracle or SAP, that they can wire up to Excel.

Small and medium businesses can’t afford an ERP, but they might want to purchase a management package in the niche realm of “SMB software”- small and medium business software. Much like their larger cousins, these SMB tools have… a different idea of code quality.

30 comments - Last comment @ 2020-08-28

Wait a Minute

by in CodeSOD on

Hanna's co-worker implemented a new service, got it deployed, and then left for vacation someplace where there's no phones or Internet. So, of course, Hanna gets a call from one of the operations folks: "That new service your team deployed keeps crashing on startup, but there's nothing in the log."

Hanna took it on herself to check into the VB.Net code.

33 comments - Last comment @ 2021-09-22

Sudon't

by in CodeSOD on

There are a few WTFs in today's story. Let's get the first one out of the way: Jan S downloaded a shell script and ran it as root, without reading it. Now, let's be fair, that's honestly a pretty mild WTF; we've all done something similar, and popular software tools still tell you to install them with a curl … | sh, and then sudo themselves extra permissions in the script.

The software being installed in this case is a tool for accessing Bitlocker encrypted drives from Linux. And the real WTF for this one is the install script, which we'll dig into in a moment. This is not, however, some small scale open source project thrown together by hobbyists, but instead released by Initech's "Data Recovery" business. In this case, this is the open source core of a larger data recovery product- if you're willing to muck around with low level commands and configs, you can do it for free, but if you want a vaguely usable UI, get ready to pony up $40.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-02

A Backwards For

by in CodeSOD on

Aurelia is working on a project where some of the code comes from a client. In this case, it appears that the client has very good reasons for hiring an outside vendor to actually build the application.

Imagine you have some Java code which needs to take an array of integers and iterate across them in reverse, to concatenate a string. Oh, and you need to add one to each item as you do this.

40 comments - Last comment @ 2020-08-28

A Shallow Perspective

by in CodeSOD on

There are times where someone writes code which does nothing. There are times where someone writes code which does something, but nothing useful. This is one of those times.

Ray H was going through some JS code, and found this “useful” method.

9 comments - Last comment @ 2020-08-20

Carbon Copy

by in CodeSOD on

I avoid writing software that needs to send emails. It's just annoying code to build, interfacing with mailservers is shockingly frustrating, and honestly, users don't tend to like the emails that my software tends to send. Once upon a time, it was a system which would tell them it was time to calibrate a scale, and the business requirements were basically "spam them like three times a day the week a scale comes do," which shockingly everyone hated.

But Krista inherited some code that sends email. The previous developer was a "senior", but probably could have had a little more supervision and maybe some mentoring on the C# language.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2021-04-11

Perls Can Change

by in CodeSOD on

Tomiko* inherited some web-scraping/indexing code from Dennis. The code started out just scanning candidate profiles for certain keywords, but grew, mutated, and eventually turned into something that also needed to download their CVs.

Now, Dennis was, as Tomiko puts it, "an interesting engineer". "Any agreed upon standard, he would aggressively oppose, and this can be seen in this code."

26 comments - Last comment @ 2020-08-26

Don't Stop the Magic

by in CodeSOD on

Don’t you believe in magic strings and numbers being bad? From the perspective of readability and future maintenance, constants are better. We all know this is true, and we all know that it can sometimes go too far.

Douwe Kasemier has a co-worker that has taken that a little too far.

37 comments - Last comment @ 2021-04-11

The Concatenator

by in CodeSOD on

In English, there's much debate over the "Oxford Comma": in a list of items, do you put a comma between the penultimate item and the "and" before the final one? For example: "The conference featured bad programmers, Remy and TheDailyWTF readers" versus "The conference featured bad programmers, Remy, and the TheDailyWTF readers."

I'd like to introduce a subtly different one: "the concatenator's comma", or if we want to be generic "the concatenator's seperator character", but that doesn't have the same ring to it. If you're planning to list items as a string, you might to something like this pseudocode:

32 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-04

A Slow Moving Stream

by in CodeSOD on

We’ve talked about Java’s streams in the past. It’s hardly a “new” feature at this point, but its blend of “being really useful” and “based on functional programming techniques” and “different than other APIs” means that we still have developers struggling to figure out how to use it.

Jeff H has a co-worker, Clarence, who is very “anti-stream”. “It creates too many copies of our objects, so it’s terrible for memory, and it’s so much slower. Don’t use streams unless you absolutely have to!” So in many a code review, Jeff submits some very simple, easy to read, and fast-performing bit of stream code, and Clarence objects. “It’s slow. It wastes memory.”

13 comments - Last comment @ 2020-08-07

A Private Code Review

by in CodeSOD on

Jessica has worked with some cunning developers in the past. To help cope with some of that “cunning”, they’ve recently gone out searching for new developers.

Now, there were some problems with their job description and salary offer, specifically, they were asking for developers who do too much and get paid too little. Which is how Jessica started working with Blair. Jessica was hoping to staff up her team with some mid-level or junior developers with a background in web development. Instead, she got Blair, a 13+ year veteran who had just started doing web development in the past six months.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-08

A Unique Choice

by in CodeSOD on

There are many ways to mess up doing unique identifiers. It's a hard problem, and that's why we've sorta agreed on a few distinct ways to do it. First, we can just autonumber. Easy, but it doesn't always scale that well, especially in distributed systems. Second, we can use something like UUIDs: mix a few bits of real data in with a big pile of random data, and you can create a unique ID. Finally, there are some hashing-related options, where the data itself generates its ID.

Tiffanie was digging into some weird crashes in a database application, and discovered that their MODULES table couldn't decide which was correct, and opted for two: MODULE_ID, an autonumbered field, and MODULE_UUID, which one would assume, held a UUID. There were also the requsite MODULE_NAME and similar fields. A quick scan of the table looked like:

MODULE_ID MODULE_NAME MODULE_UUID MODULE_DESC
0 Defects 8461aa9b-ba38-4201-a717-cee257b73af0 Defects
1 Test Plan 06fd18eb-8214-4431-aa66-e11ae2a6c9b3 Test Plan
23 comments - Last comment @ 2020-08-14
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