Recent Articles

Jul 2020

Please Reboot Faster, I Can't Wait Any Longer

by in Error'd on

"Saw this at a German gas station along the highway. The reboot screen at the pedestal just kept animating the hourglass," writes Robin G.


A Variation on Nulls

by in CodeSOD on

Submitter “NotAThingThatHappens” stumbled across a “unique” way to check for nulls in C#.

Now, there are already a few perfectly good ways to check for nulls. variable is null, for example, or use nullable types specifically. But “NotAThingThatHappens” found approach:


True if Documented

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“Comments are important,” is one of those good rules that often gets misapplied. No one wants to see a method called addOneToSet and a comment that tells us Adds one item to the set.

Still, a lot of our IDEs and other tooling encourage these kinds of comments. You drop a /// or /* before a method or member, and you get an autostubbed out comment that gives you a passable, if useless, comment.


Underscoring the Comma

by in CodeSOD on

Andrea writes to confess some sins, though I'm not sure who the real sinner is. To understand the sins, we have to talk a little bit about C/C++ macros.

Andrea was working on some software to control a dot-matrix display from an embedded device. Send an array of bytes to it, and the correct bits on the display light up. Now, if you're building something like this, you want an easy way to "remember" the proper sequences. So you might want to do something like:


Ultrabase

by in Feature Articles on

After a few transfers across departments at IniTech, Lydia found herself as a senior developer on an internal web team. They built intranet applications which covered everything from home-grown HR tools to home-grown supply chain tools, to home-grown CMSes, to home-grown "we really should have purchased something but the approval process is so onerous and the budgeting is so constrained that it looks cheaper to carry an IT team despite actually being much more expensive".

A new feature request came in, and it seemed extremely easy. There was a stored procedure that was normally invoked by a scheduled job. The admin users in one of the applications wanted to be able to invoke it on demand. Now, Lydia might be "senior", but she was new to the team, so she popped over to Desmond's cube to see what he thought.


Free Coff...Wait!

by in Error'd on

"Hey! I like free coffee! Let me just go ahead and...um...hold on a second..." writes Adam R.


A Step too Var

by in CodeSOD on

Astor works for a company that provides software for research surveys. Someone needed a method to return a single control object from a list of control objects, so they wrote this C# code:

 
private ResearchControl GetResearchControlFromListOfResearchControls(int theIndex, 
    List<ResearchControl> researchControls)
{
    var result = new ResearchControl();
    result = researchControls[theIndex];
    return result;
}

Science Is Science

by in Feature Articles on

Oil well

Bruce worked for a small engineering consultant firm providing custom software solutions for companies in the industrial sector. His project for CompanyX involved data consolidation for a new oil well monitoring system. It was a two-phased approach: Phase 1 was to get the raw instrument data into the cloud, and Phase 2 was to aggregate that data into a useful format.


A Dropped Pass

by in CodeSOD on

A charitable description of Java is that it’s a strict language, at least in terms of how it expects you to interact with types and definitions. That strictness can create conflict when you’re interacting with less strict systems, like JSON data.

Tessie produces data as a JSON API that wraps around sensing devices which report a numerical value. These sensors, as far as we care for this example, come in two flavors: ones that report a maximum recorded value, and ones which don’t. Something like:


Mega-Agile

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A long time ago, way back in 2009, Bruce W worked for the Mega-Bureaucracy. It was a slog of endless forms, endless meetings, endless projects that just never hit a final ship date. The Mega-Bureaucracy felt that the organization which manages best manages the most, and ensured that there were six tons of management overhead attached to the smallest project.

After eight years in that position, Bruce finally left for another division in the same company.


Not Applicable

by in Error'd on

"Why yes, I have always pictured myself as not applicable," Olivia T. wrote.


Because of the Implication

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Even when you’re using TypeScript, you’re still bound by JavaScript’s type system. You’re also stuck with its object system, which means that each object is really just a dict, and there’s no guarantee that any object has any given key at runtime.

Madison sends us some TypeScript code that is, perhaps not strictly bad, in and of itself, though it certainly contains some badness. It is more of a symptom. It implies a WTF.


Dates by the Dozen

by in CodeSOD on
Before our regularly scheduled programming, Code & Supply, a developer community group we've collaborated with in the past, is running a salary survey, to gauge the state of the industry. More responses are always helpful, so I encourage you to take a few minutes and pitch in.

Cid was recently combing through an inherited Java codebase, and it predates Java 8. That’s a fancy way of saying “there were no good date builtins, just a mess of cruddy APIs”. That’s not to say that there weren’t date builtins prior to Java 8- they were just bad.

Bad, but better than this. Cid sent along a lot of code, and instead of going through it all, let’s get to some of the “highlights”. Much of this is stuff we’ve seen variations on before, but have been combined in ways to really elevate the badness. There are dozens of these methods, which we are only going to look at a sample of.


An Exceptional Leader

by in Representative Line on

IniTech’s IniTest division makes a number of hardware products, like a protocol analyzer which you can plug into a network and use to monitor data in transport. As you can imagine, it involves a fair bit of software, and it involves a fair bit of hardware. Since it’s a testing and debugging tool, reliability, accuracy, and stability are the watchwords of the day.

Which is why the software development process was overseen by Russel. Russel was the “Alpha Geek”, blessed by the C-level to make sure that the software was up to snuff. This lead to some conflict- Russel had a bad habit of shoulder-surfing his fellow developers and telling them what to type- but otherwise worked very well. Foibles aside, Russel was technically competent, knew the problem domain well, and had a clean, precise, and readable coding style which all the other developers tried to imitate.


A Revolutionary Vocabulary

by in Feature Articles on

Changing the course of a large company is much like steering the Titanic: it's probably too late, it's going to end in tears, and for some reason there's going to be a spirited debate about the bouyancy and stability of the doors.

Shena works at Initech, which is already a gigantic, creaking organization on the verge of toppling over. Management recognizes the problems, and knows something must be done. They are not, however, particularly clear about what that something should actually be, so they handed the Project Management Office a budget, told them to bring in some consultants, and do something.


They Said the Math Checks Out!

by in Error'd on

"So...I guess...they want me to spend more?" Angela A. writes.


Is It the Same?

by in CodeSOD on

A common source of bad code is when you have a developer who understands one thing very well, but is forced- either through organizational changes or the tides of history- to adapt to a new tool which they don’t understand. But a possibly more severe problem is modern developers not fully understanding why certain choices may have been made. Today’s code isn’t a WTF, it’s actually very smart.

Eric P was digging through some antique Fortran code, just exploring some retrocomputing history, and found a block which needed to check if two values were the same.


A Private Matter

by in CodeSOD on

Tim Cooper was digging through the code for a trip-planning application. This particular application can plan a trip across multiple modes of transportation, from public transit to private modes, like rentable scooters or bike-shares.

This need to discuss private modes of transportation can lead to some… interesting code.


Your Personal Truth

by in CodeSOD on

There are still some environments where C may not have easy access to a stdbool header file. That's easy to fix, of course. The basic pattern is to typedef an integer type as a boolean type, and then define some symbols for true and false. It's a pretty standard pattern, three lines of code, and unless you insist that FILE_NOT_FOUND is a boolean value, it's pretty hard to mess up.

Julien H was compiling some third-party C code, specifically in Visual Studio 2010, and as it turns out, VS2010 doesn't support C99, and thus doesn't have a stdbool. But, as stated, it's an easy pattern to implement, so the third party library went and implemented it:


Classic WTF: Dimensioning the Dimension

by in CodeSOD on
It was a holiday weekend in the US, so we're taking a little break. Yes, I know that most people took Friday off, but as this article demonstrates, dates remain hard. Original -- Remy

It's not too uncommon to see a Java programmer write a method to get the name of a month based on the month number. Sure, month name formatting is built in via SimpleDateFormat, but the documentation can often be hard to read. And since there's really no other place to find the answer, it's excusable that a programmer will just write a quick method to do this.

I have to say though, Robert Cooper's colleague came up with a very interesting way of doing this: adding an[other] index to an array ...


Take a Risk on NaN

by in Error'd on

"Sure, I know how long the free Standard Shipping will take, but maybe, just maybe, if I choose Economy, my package will have already arrived! Or never," Philip G. writes.


ABCD

by in Feature Articles on

As is fairly typical in our industry, Sebastian found himself working as a sub-contractor to a sub-contractor to a contractor to a big company. In this case, it was IniDrug, a pharmaceutical company.

Sebastian was building software that would be used at various steps in the process of manufacturing, which meant he needed to spend a fair bit of time in clean rooms, and on air-gapped networks, to prevent trade secrets from leaking out.


locurlicenseucesss

by in CodeSOD on

The past few weeks, I’ve been writing software for a recording device. This is good, because when I’m frustrated by the bugs I put in the code and I start cursing at it, it’s not venting, it’s testing.

There are all sorts of other little things we can do to vent. Imagine, if you will, you find yourself writing an if with an empty body, but an else clause that does work. You’d probably be upset at yourself. You might be stunned. You might be so tired it feels like a good idea at the time. You might be deep in the throes of “just. work. goddammit”. Regardless of the source of that strain, you need to let it out somewhere.