The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

What a Happy Date

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-07-31

As is the case with pretty much any language these days, Python comes with robust date handling functionality. If you want to know something like what the day of the month is? datetime.now().day will tell you. Simple, easy, and of course, just an invitation for someone to invent their own.

Jan was witness to a little date-time related office politics. This particular political battle started during a code review. Klaus had written some date mangling code, relying heavily on strftime to parse dates out to strings and then parse them back in as integers. Richard, quite reasonably, pointed out that Klaus was taking the long way around, and maybe Klaus should possibly think about doing it in a simpler fashion.

34 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-05

This Process is Nuts

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2019-07-30

A great man once said "I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were merry." As pleasing of a sight as that was, what if the squirrels weren't merry?

Grady had an unpleasant experience with bushy-tailed rodents at a former job. Before starting at the Fintech firm as a data scientist, he was assured the Business Intelligence department was very advanced and run by an expert. They needed Grady to manipulate large data sets and implement machine learning to help out Lenny, the resident BI "expert". It quickly became apparent that Lenny didn't put the "Intelligence" in Business Intelligence.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-22

Some Kind of Magic

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-07-29

We all have our little bits of sloppiness and our bad habits. Most of us have more than one. One place I'm likely to get lazy, especially as I'm feeling my way around a problem, is with magic numbers. I always mean to go back and replace them with a constant, but sometimes there's another fire you need to put out and you just don't get back to it till somebody calls it out in a code review.

Then, of course, there are the folks who go too far. I once got a note complaining that I shouldn't have used 2*PI, but instead should have created a new constant, TAU. I disavow the need for tau, but my critic said magic numbers, like two, were disallowed, so I said "ciao" and tau is there now.

38 comments - Last comment @ 2024-03-28

Nice Day for Golf (in Hades)

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2019-07-26

"A coworker was looking up what the weather was going to be like for his tee time. He said he’s definitely wearing shorts," writes Angela A.

7 comments - Last comment @ 2019-07-29

Null Thought

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-07-25

These days, it almost seems like most of the developers writing code for the Java Virtual Machine aren’t doing it in Java. It’s honestly an interesting thing for programming language development, as more and more folks put together languages with fundamentally different principles from Java that still work on the JVM.

Like Kotlin. Kotlin blends functional programming styles with object-oriented principles and syntactic features built around writing more compact, concise code than equivalent Java. And it’s not even limited to Java- it can compile down into JavaScript or even target LLVM.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2019-07-26

A Long Conversion

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-07-24

Let’s talk a little bit about .NET’s TryParse method. Many types, especially the built in numerics, support it, alongside a Parse. The key difference between Parse and TryParse is that TryParse bakes the exception handling logic in it. Instead of using exceptions to tell you if it can parse or not, it returns a boolean value, instead.

If, for example, you wanted to take an input, and either store it as an integer in a database, or store a null, you might do something like this:

18 comments - Last comment @ 2019-07-26

Break my Validation

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-07-23

Linda inherited an inner-platform front-end framework. It was the kind of UI framework with an average file size of 1,000 lines of code, and an average test coverage of 0%.

Like most UI frameworks, it had a system for doing client side validation. Like most inner-platform UI frameworks, the validation system was fragile, confusing, and impossible to understand.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2019-12-18

An Indispensible Guru

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2019-07-22

Business Intelligence is the oxymoron that makes modern capitalism possible. In order for a company the size of a Fortune 500 to operate, key people have to know key numbers: how the finances are doing, what sales looks like, whether they're trending on target to meet their business goals or above or below that mystical number.

35 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-23

The Parameter was NOT Set

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2019-07-19

"Spotted this in front of a retro-looking record player in an Italian tech shop. I don't think anybody had any idea how to categorize it so they just left it up to the system," Marco D. writes.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2019-07-25

The Hardware Virus

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2019-07-18

Jen was a few weeks into her new helpdesk job. Unlike past jobs, she started getting her own support tickets quickly—but a more veteran employee, Stanley, had been tasked with showing her the ropes. He also got notification of Jen's tickets, and they worked on them together. A new ticket had just come in, asking for someone to replace the DVI cable that'd gone missing from Conference Room 3. Such cables were the means by which coworkers connected their laptops to projectors for presentations.

47 comments - Last comment @ 2019-07-23

Meetup in Kansas City: Dinner and a Pint after KCDC

by Michael Dowden in Announcements on 2019-07-17

The Kansas City Developer Conference is this week, followed by PubConf. Between these two events on Friday evening is plenty of time for a TDWTF dinner, and that's exactly what we're planning!

If you find yourself in Kansas City Missouri this Friday, for KCDC, PubConf, or perhaps because you live here, please come out to the Dubliner at 5:30 PM for dinner and a pint. I'll be there along with Martine Dowden and some TDWTF swag to give away. We'll talk software, discuss what we took away from the conference, and can head over to PubConf together.

2 comments - Last comment @ 2019-07-18

Nothing Direct About directAddCartEntry

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-07-17

It’s old hat, but every function, every class, every code unit you write, should all have a single, well-defined purpose. “Do one thing, and do it well,” as it were.

Of course, sometimes, it’s easier said that done, and mindlessly following that advice can lead to premature abstraction, and then you’ll have quite a mess on your hands. Still, it’s good advice, and a great design goal, even if you don’t head straight there.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2021-01-08

Brütäl Glöbs

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-07-16

Noam and a few friends decided it was time for them to launch their own product. They were young, optimistic about their career, and had some opinions about the best way to handle some basic network monitoring and scanning tasks. So they iterated on the idea a few times, until one day the program just started hanging. At first, Noam thought it was just a hang, but after walking away from the machine for a few minutes in frustration, he discovered that it was just running really slow.

After a little investigation, he tracked down the problem to the function responsible for checking if an IP matched a filter. That filter could contain globs, which made things a bit tricky, but his partner had some ideas about how best to handle them.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2019-07-19

The Enterprise Backup Batch

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2019-07-15

If a piece of software is described in any way, shape or form as being "enterprise", it's a safe bet that you don't actually want to use it. As a general rule, "enterprise" software packages mix the Inner-Platform Effect with trying to be all things to all customers, with thousands upon thousands of lines of legacy code that can't be touched because at least one customer depends on those quirks. There doesn't tend to be much competition in the "enterprise" space, so none of the vendors actually put any thought into making their products good. That's what salesbeasts and lawyers are for.

Kristoph M supports a deployment of Initech's data warehouse system. Since this system is a mix of stored procedures and SSIS packages, Kristoph can actually read a good portion of the code which makes the product work. They just choose not to. And that's usually a good choice.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2019-07-23

Errors Don't Always Ad up

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2019-07-12

"You know, I'm thinking that The guys working on AT&T's DIRECTV service must have not done well with fractions in school," Andrew T. writes.

12 comments - Last comment @ 2019-07-15

Null Error Handling

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-07-11

Oliver works for a very large company. Just recently, someone decided that it was time to try out those “newfangled REST services.”

Since this was “new”, at least within the confines of the organization, that meant there were a lot more eyes on the project and a more thorough than average code review process. That’s how Oliver found this.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2022-02-20

Structured Searching

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-07-10

It’s hard to do any non-trivial programming in C without having to use a struct. Structs are great! A single variable holds access to multiple pieces of data, and all the nasty details of how they’re laid out in memory are handled by the compiler.

In more modern OO languages, we take that kind of thing for granted. We’re so abstracted from the details of how memory is laid out it’s easy to forget how tricky and difficult actually managing that kind of memory layout is.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2019-07-15

Process by Management

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2019-07-09

Alice's team was thirty developers, taking up most of the floor of a nondescript office building in yet another office park. Their team was a contractor-to-a-contractor for a branch of the US military, which meant a variety of things. First, bringing a thumb drive into the office was a firing offense. Second, they were used to a certain level of bureaucracy. You couldn't change a line of code unless you had four different documents confirming the change was necessary and was authorized, and actually deploying a change was a milestone event with code freezes and expected extra hours.

Despite all this, the thirty person team had built a great working relationship. They had made their process as efficient as they could, and their PM, Doug, understood the work well enough to keep things streamlined. In fact, Doug did such a good job that Doug got promoted. Enter Millie, his replacement.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-23

The Bogus Animation

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-07-08

Animations have become such an omnipresent part of our UI designs anymore that we tend to only notice them when they're bad.

Ben is working on an iOS application which appeared to have a "bad" animation. In this case, it's bad because it's slow. How slow? Well, they have a table view with ten items in it, and the items should quickly tween to their new state- position, text, colors all could change in this process. And it was taking four seconds.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2019-07-12

Classic WTF: Working Around, Over and Through the Process

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2019-07-05

It's still a holiday weekend in the US; after playing with fireworks yesterday, most of us have to spend today trying to find the fingers we lost. There are no fireworks in this classic story, but there may be some karma… Original --Remy

When Kevin landed a job at Townbank in the late 1980s, he came face-to-face with the same thing that thousands of newly minted developers had encountered before and since – there is more to being a corporate programmer than just writing code – there’s the process.

Second only, perhaps, to the strict rules commanded by the world’s religions, the process keeps the code consistent. Glory to the process – praised be the process - the process is good, the process should always be followed, and above all, the process is good for you!

9 comments - Last comment @ 2019-07-08

Classic WTF: The Backup Snippet

by Alex Papadimoulis in Representative Line on 2019-07-04

It's "Independence Day" here in the US, which is the day in which developers celebrate their independence from DBAs and switch everything over to NoSQL, no matter what the cost. Or something like that, the history is a little fuzzy. But it's a holiday here, so in honor of that, here's a related story. Original --Remy

Generally speaking, Andrew tries his best to avoid the DBA team. It's not just because database administrators tend to be a unique breed (his colleagues were certainly no exception), but because of the "things" that he'd heard about the team. The sort of "things" that keep developers up at night and make them regret not becoming an accountant.

One day, while debugging an issue with their monitoring scripts, Andrew had no choice but to check with Thom, a member of Team DBA. It turned out that one of DBA's had recently updated their database backup script, but Thom wasn't really sure who did it, why it was done, or what it looked like before. So, he just sent Andrew the entire backup script.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2019-07-15

Answer the Questions on this Test

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-07-03

Jake works in Python. Python is a very flexible language, and Jake has some co-workers who like to exploit it as much as possible.

Specifically, they’re notorious for taking advantage of how any symbol can be redefined, as needed. Is int a built-in function? Yes. But what if you want to have a variable called int? No problem! Just go ahead and do it. Python won’t mind if you do int = int(5).

25 comments - Last comment @ 2024-04-04

The Wizard of Speed and Time

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-07-02

Christopher started a new job as a “full-stack” developer. Unfortunately, most of the developers are still on the “why do you need anything other than jQuery” school of front-end development, despite efforts to transition their UIs to Vue.

This meant that Christopher didn’t do much backend, and ended up being the mid-level front-end dev, in practice if not in job title.

13 comments - Last comment @ 2019-07-09

A Passion for Testing

by Jane Bailey in Tales from the Interview on 2019-07-01

The interview was going well—as well as one could possibly expect. Alarik, the candidate, had a no-nonsense attitude, a high degree of precision to his speech, and a heavy German accent. He was applying for a job with Erik's company as a C# developer working on an inherited legacy codebase, and he'd almost earned himself the job. There was just one routine question left in the interview:

44 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-14

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