The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Users That Bug You

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-10-28

I frequently write bad code. I mean, we all do, but I frequently write bad code with full knowledge that it's bad, because I first want to test out an idea. Or, I want to inject some additional behavior just for one run, because I'm trying to debug something. If that idea or debugging hook turns out to be valuable, I'll frequently refactor it into something useful and enable it via a flag or something.

Which brings us to the crash Doug was investigating in a VB.Net application. For some reason, the username field was an empty string after logging in, and a bunch of methods which expected the username to have a value misbehaved after that.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2021-11-02

Patching Over Your Problem

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-10-26

Deanna inherited some code which had gone through many, many previous hands. Like a lot of JavaScript/TypeScript code, it needed to be able to compare objects for deep equality. This is fraught and complicated, and there are many many many solutions available in NPM.

NPM, of course, is its own fraught thing. Widely used libraries frequently have vulnerabilities, and even if you don't use them directly, the nature of dependency management via NPM means that libraries your libraries depend on might.

9 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-26

Read the Comments

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-10-25

Many many years ago, when I took my first programming course in high school, our instructor had… opinions. One of those opinions was that you should manually syntax check your code and not rely on compiler errors, because back in her day, you had to punch your program into cards, drop it off in the computer lab, wait for the technician to run your batch, and then pick up the results on the printer. It needed to work the first try or you might be waiting a whole day before you could try again.

One of her other opinions was that your code should contain as many comments as it contained lines of code. Everything needed comments. Everything. Which brings us to this code from Doug.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-26

A Ritual Approach

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-10-20

Frequent contributor Russell F stumbled across this block, which illustrates an impressive ability to make a wide variety of bad choices. It is written in C#, but one has the sense that the developer didn't really understand C#. Or, honestly, programming.

if (row["Appointment_Num"].ToString() == row["Appointment_Num"].ToString())
{
    bool b1 = String.IsNullOrEmpty(results.messages[0].error_text);
    if (b1 == true)
    {
        row["Message_Id"] = ($"{results.messages[0].message_id}");
        row["message_count"] = ($"{results.message_count[0] }");
        row["message_cost"] = ($"{results.messages[0].message_price }");
        row["error_text"] = ($"{results.messages[0].error_text }");
        row["network"] = ($"{results.messages[0].network }");
        row["to"] = ($"{results.messages[0].to }");
        row["status"] = ($"{results.messages[0].status }");
        row["communicationtype_num"] = ($"1");
        row["Sent_Date"] = (String.Format("{0:yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss}", DateTime.Now));
        row["Sent_Message"] = row["Sent_Message"].ToString();
    }

    if (b1 == false)
    {
        row["Message_Id"] = "0000000000000000";
        row["message_count"] = ($"{results.message_count[0] }");
        row["message_cost"] = ($"{results.messages[0].message_price }");
        row["error_text"] = ($"{results.messages[0].error_text }");
        row["network"] = ($"{results.messages[0].network }");
        row["to"] = ($"{results.messages[0].to }");
        row["status"] = ($"{results.messages[0].status }");
        row["communicationtype_num"] = ($"1");
        row["Sent_Date"] = (String.Format("{0:yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss}", DateTime.Now));
        row["Sent_Message"] = row["Sent_Message"].ToString();
    }
}

25 comments - Last comment @ 2021-11-30

Low (Quality) Code

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-10-19

Like the tides, the popularity of low-code development environments comes in ebbs and flows. With each cycle, the landscape changes, old tools going away and new tools washing up on shore. One one hand, democratizing access to technology is good, on the other, these tools inevitably fail to actually do that. Instead, we get mission critical developed by people who don't understand how to develop, and are thus fragile, and released on platforms that are almost certainly going to be on legacy support in the next cycle.

I don't want to imply that low-code tools are automatically bad, or insult non-developers who want to give developing in a low-code environment a shot, though. Especially when professional developers can't really do any better.

35 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-21

An Hourly Rate

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-10-18

When someone mentioned to Abraham, "Our product has an auto-sync feature that fires every hour," Abraham wasn't surprised. He was new to the team, didn't know the code well, but an auto-sync back to the server sounded reasonable.

The approach, however, left something to be desired.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-21

Joining the Rest of Us

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-10-14

Using built-in methods is good and normal, but it's certainly boring. When someone, for example, has a list of tags in an array, and calls string.Join(" ", tags), I don't really learn anything about the programmer as a person. There's no relationship or connection, no deeper understanding of them.

Which, let's be honest, is a good thing when it comes to delivering good software. But watching people reinvent built in methods is a fun way to see how their brain works. Fun for me, because I don't work with them, probably less fun for Mike, who inherited this C# code.

30 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-21

Supporting Standards

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-10-13

Starting in the late 2000s, smartphones and tablets took off, and for a lot of people, they constituted a full replacement for a computer. By the time the iPad and Microsoft Surface took off, every pointy-haired-boss wanted to bring a tablet into their meetings, and do as much work as possible on that tablet.

Well, nearly every PHB. Lutz worked for a company where management was absolutely convinced that tablets, smartphones, and frankly, anything smaller than the cheapest Dell laptop with the chunkiest plastic case was nothing more than a toy. It was part of the entire management culture, led by the CEO, Barry. When one of Lutz's co-workers was careless enough to mention in passing an article they'd read on mobile-first development, Barry scowled and said "We are a professional software company that develops professional business software."

33 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-18

Like a Tree, and…

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-10-12

Duncan B was contracting with a company, and the contract had, up to this point, gone extremely well. The last task Duncan needed to spec out was incorporating employee leave/absences into the monthly timesheets.

"Hey, can I get some test data?" he asked the payroll system administrators.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2022-10-10

Price Conversions

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-10-11

Russell F has an object that needs to display prices. Notably, this view object only ever displays a price, it never does arithmetic on it. Specifically, it displays the prices for tires, which adds a notable challenge to the application: not every car uses the same tires on the front and rear axles. This is known as a "staggered fitment", and in those cases the price for the front tires and the rear tires will be different.

The C# method which handles some of this display takes the price of the front tires and displays it quite simply:

34 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-27

Making Newlines

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-10-07

I recently started a new C++ project. As it's fairly small and has few dependencies, I made a very conscious choice to just write a shell script to handle compilation. Yes, a Makefile would be "better", but it also adds a lot of complexity my project doesn't need, when I can have essentially a one-line build command. Still, my code has suddenly discovered the need for a second target, and I'll probably migrate to Makefiles- it's easier to add complexity when I need it.

Kai's organization transitioned from the small shell-scripts approach to builds to using Makefiles about a year ago. Kai wasn't involved in that initial process, but has since needed to make some modifications to the Makefiles. In this case, there's a separate Makefile for each one of their hundreds of microservices.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-08

Unzipped

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-10-05

When you promise to deliver a certain level of service, you need to live up to that promise. When your system is critical to your customers, there are penalties for failing to live up to that standard. For the mission-critical application Rich D supports, that penalty is $10,000 a minute for any outages.

Now, one might think that such a mission critical system has a focus on testing, code quality, and stability. You probably don't think that, but someone might expect that.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-07

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