If you go by the popular press articles on the tech field, anyone who's anyone has migrated into the "machine learning" space. That's where all the "smart" programmers go.

Of course, ML is really just statistics and automated model fitting. It's a powerful tool, and it does require some highly specialized skills- skills that might involve programming, but maybe don't quite overlap with programming.

When RJ was trawling through some SQL Server stored procedure code, they spotted this line:

IF LEN(LTRIM(RTRIM(@funky_interval))) = 0 SET @funky_interval = NULL

For those looking to get into software development, there's never been more access to tutorials, guides, training programs, and communities of developers ready to foster those trying to get started.

Unfortunately, you've got folks that think because they've written a few websites, they're ready to teach others, and write up their own tutorials without having the programming background or the educational background to effectively communicate best practices to the public.

Sometimes bad code arises from incompetence, whether individual, or more usually institutional. Sometimes it's overly tight deadlines, misguided architecture. And sometimes… it's just the easiest way.

Naomi writes in to confess to some bad code.

Unit testing in C offers its own special challenges. Unit testing an application heavily dependent upon threads, written in C, offers even more.

Brian inherited an application where the main loop of the actual application looked something like: