The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

A Unique Specification

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-06-19

One of the skills I think programmers should develop is not directly programming related: you should be comfortable reading RFCs. If, for example, you want to know what actually constitutes an email address, you may want to brush up on your BNF grammars. Reading and understanding an RFC is its own skill, and while I wouldn’t suggest getting in the habit of reading RFCs for fun, it’s something you should do from time to time.

To build the skill, I recommend picking a simple one, like UUIDs. There’s a lot of information encoded in a UUID, and five different ways to define UUIDs- though usually we use type 1 (timestamp-based) and type 4 (random). Even if you haven’t gone through and read the spec, you already know the most important fact about UUIDs: they’re unique. They’re universally unique in fact, and you can use them as identifiers. You shouldn’t have a collision happen within the lifetime of the universe, unless someone does something incredibly wrong.

27 comments - Last comment @ 12:50

The Sanity Check

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-06-18

I've been automating deployments at work, and for Reasons™, this is happening entirely in BASH. Those Reasons™ are that the client wants to use Salt, but doesn't want to give us access to their Salt environment. Some of our deployment targets are microcontrollers, so Salt isn't even an option.

While I know the shell well enough, I'm getting comfortable with more complicated scripts than I usually write, along with tools like xargs which may be the second best shell command ever invented. yes is the best, obviously.

36 comments - Last comment @ 10:33

Maximum Performance

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-06-12

There is some code, that at first glance, doesn’t seem great, but doesn’t leap out as a WTF. Stephe sends one such block.

double SomeClass::getMaxKeyValue(std::vector<double> list)
{
    double max = 0;
    for (int i = 0; i < list.size(); i++) {
        if (list[i] > max) {
            max = list[i];
        }
    }
    return max;
}

32 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-15

The Enabler

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-06-11

Shaneka works on software for an embedded device for a very demanding client. In previous iterations of the software, the client had made their own modifications to the device's code, and demanded they be incorporated. Over the years, more and more of the code came from the client, until the day when the client decided it was too much effort to maintain the ball of mud and just started demanding features.

One specific feature was a new requirement for turning the display on and off. Shaneka attempted to implement the feature, and it didn't work. No matter what she did, once they turned the display off, they simply couldn't turn it back on without restarting the whole system.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-14

Many Happy Returns

by snoofle in CodeSOD on 2018-06-06

We've all encountered a situation where changing requirements caused some function that had a single native return type to need to return a second value. One possible solution is to put the two return values in some wrapper class as follows:

30 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-12

A/F Testing

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-06-04

A/B testing is a strange beast, to me. I understand the motivations, but to me, it smacks of "I don't know what the requirements should be, so I'll just randomly show users different versions of my software until something 'sticks'". Still, it's a standard practice in modern UI design.

What isn't standard is this little blob of code sent to us anonymously. It was found in a bit of code responsible for A/B testing.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-08