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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.
Matt was handed a pile of VB .Net code, and told, "This is yours now. I'm sorry."
As often happens, previous company leadership said, "Why should I pay top dollar for experienced software engineers when I can hire three kids out of college for the same price?" The experiment ended poorly, and the result was a pile of bad VB code, which Matt now owned.
Jessica recently started at a company still using Windows Forms.
Well, that was a short article. Oh, you want more WTF than that? Sure, we can do that.
In theory, HTTP status codes should be easy to work with. In the 100s? You're doing some weird stuff and breaking up large requests into multiple sub-requests. 200s? It's all good. 300s? Look over there. 400s? What the hell are you trying to do? 500s? What the hell is the server trying to do?
This doesn't mean people don't endlessly find ways to make it hard. LinkedIn, for example, apparently likes to send 999s if you try and view a page without being logged in. Shopify has invented a few. Apache has added a 218 "This is Fine". And then there's WebDAV, which not only adds new status codes, but adds a whole bunch of new verbs to HTTP requests.
For months, everything at Yusuf's company was fine. Then, suddenly, he comes in to the office to learn that overnight the log exploded with thousands of panic messages. No software changes had been pushed, no major configurations had happened- just a reboot. What had gone wrong?
This particular function was invoked as part of the application startup:
Andreas found this in a rather large, rather ugly production code base.
Jul 25private static void LogView(object o)
{
try
{
ArrayList al = (ArrayList)o;
int pageId = (int)al[0];
int userId = (int)al[1];
// ... snipped: Executing a stored procedure that stores the values in the database
}
catch (Exception) { }
}
Ronan works with a vibe coder- an LLM addicted developer. This is a type of developer that's showing up with increasing frequency. Their common features include: not reading the code the AI generated, not testing the code the AI generated, not understanding the context of the code or how it integrates into the broader program, and absolutely not bothering to follow the company coding standards.
Here's an example of the kind of Python code they were "writing":
JavaScript is frequently surprising in terms of what functions it does not support. For example, while it has a Math.round function, that only rounds to the nearest integer, not an arbitrary precision. That's no big deal, of course, as if you wanted to round to, say, four decimal places, you could write something like: Math.floor(n * 10000) / 10000.
But in the absence of a built-in function to handle that means that many developers choose to reinvent the wheel. Ryan found this one.
We've discussed singleton abuse as an antipattern many times on this site, but folks keep trying to find new ways to implement them badly. And Olivia's co-worker certainly found one.
We start with a C++ utility class with a bunch of functions in it:
While I frequently have complaints about over-reliance on Object Relational Mapping tools, they do offer key benefits. For example, mapping each relation in the database to a type in your programming language at least guarantees a bit of type safety in your code. Or, you could be like Nick L's predecessor, and write VB code like this.
For i As Integer = 0 To SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows.Count - 1
Try 'Handles DBNull
Select Case SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(0)
Case "Bently" 'Probes
Probes_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim)
Case "Keyphasor"
Keyphasor_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim)
Case "Transmitter"
Transmitter_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim)
Case "Tachometer"
Tachometer_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim.ToUpper.ToString.Trim)
Case "Dial Therm"
DialThermometer_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim)
Case "DPS"
DPS_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim)
Case "Pump Bracket"
PumpBracket_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim)
Case "Accelerometer"
Accelerometer_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim)
Case "Velometer"
Velometer_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim)
End Select
Catch
'MessageBox.Show(text:="Error during SetModelNums().", _
' caption:="Error", _
' buttons:=MessageBoxButtons.OK, _
' icon:=MessageBoxIcon.Error)
End Try
Next
Michael has the "fun" task of converting old, mainframe-driven reports into something more modern. This means reading through reams of Intelligent Query code.
Like most of these projects, no one has a precise functional definition of what it's supposed to do. The goal is to replace the system with one that behaves exactly the same, but is more "modern". This means their test cases are "run the two systems in parallel and compare the outputs; if they match, the upgrade is good."
User inputs are frequently incorrect, which is why we validate them. So, for example, if the user is allowed to enter an "asset ID" to perform some operation on it, we should verify that the asset ID exists before actually doing the operation.
Someone working with Capybara James almost got there. Almost.