We're taking a little summer break this week for our regular articles. Since we're re-using articles, let's start with one about developer efficiency. Why write code when you can automate writing code? Original -- Remy

Several years ago, Dan D’s predecessor, Steve, came to the realization that many of us arrived at one point or another: writing data-access code can get boring and repetitive. To ease the tedium, Steve did what many developers in his position do. He wrote some code to generate a lot of code.

Unfortunately, Steve’s coding skills weren’t all too hot. Worse were his code-writing-code writing skills. In the years since The Great Code Spawn (as it has come to be known), the data-access layer has become an unmaintainable disaster – so much so that, rather than add a new database column, developers have “split” single fields into multiple through bit-shifting and string manipulation.

Mark's team needed someone to write a pretty straight-forward report for their Python application. It would take a set of keyword arguments, turn those into a filter, apply the filter, and get the results back.

This was implemented in two methods. First:

The time and effort needed to complete a project and the amount of time available rarely line up well. Wayne M's company found themselves in a position where what they needed to deliver and what they could deliver by the deadline simply didn't match up.

The requirements were well specified, so they bundled up a bunch of requirements for search-related functionality, and handed them off to a self-described "world class" developer working on contract.

Once upon a time, someone wanted to add a banner to a web page. They also wanted the banner to only appear after a certain date. Jack stumbled across their implementation when trying to understand why the banner would vanish for two weeks at the start of every month.

// get date
var MyDate = new Date();
var MyDateString;

MyDate.setDate(MyDate.getDate());

MyDateString = ('0' + MyDate.getDate()).slice(-2) + '-' + ('0' + (MyDate.getMonth()+1)).slice(-2) + '-' + MyDate.getFullYear();

if (MyDateString > '13-04-2014') {
    // do stuff...
}

Behind every code WTF is a process WTF. For example, Charles W was recently tasked with updating some file-handling code to match changes in the underlying file-format it parses. This is the C code which parses an integer:

		if ((*p == '-' || ('0' <= *p && '9' >= *p)) && retCode == -256)
		{
			retCode = 0;
			p = _tcsrev(p);
			if (*p == ' ')
				p++;
			for (i = 0; '0' <= *p && '9' >= *p; i++)
			{
				retCode += (int)pow(10, (double)i) * ((int)*p - 0x30);
				p++;
			}
			if (*p == '-')
				retCode *= -1;
		}