Recent Articles

Oct 2019

What Lives Beyond the Blue Screen (2019)

by in Feature Articles on

As promised in the sneak peak, we have a very special Halloween feature planned for today! What Lives Beyond the Blue Screen is an animated story by Lorne Kates (voiced by Jack Rhysider), made in collaboration with our new friends at Human Readable Magazine:

An everyday programmer decides to clean up the mess of his company's infrastructure before the big merger only to accidentally run the wrong command on the wrong location. Join the adventure as they rush to fix the mistake before they bring down the entire company.


Tern Down Service

by in CodeSOD on

In C, it’s not uncommon to define a macro like this one:

#define MIN(a,b) (a>b?b:a)


Once Bitten, Twice Tested

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Blake had recently been hired as a software tester, tasked with testing the company's product on the latest operating system, Windows 2000. After running through his battery of tests, he informed management that he hadn't encountered any issues, and the product was dubbed Windows 2000-ready. During the next several weeks, the product was smoothly deployed by customers—until an installer bug report came in.


To Be Random Enough

by in CodeSOD on

A long time ago, when I was first learning about databases, one of the points brought up was the difference between a "natural key" and a "surrogate key". A natural key was a unique identifier which already existed in your dataset, and surrogate keys were those you made up- UUIDs or sequences or what have you.

As a best practice, even if you have a viable natural key, you should still use a surrogate key. There are exceptions, but it's usually preferable to employ a database key which you control to provide identity, especially one which has no meaning- because that means it'll never need to change values.


Errors on the Go!

by in Error'd on

"These adertisers are getting smarter. Picture ads of 'one weird trick doctors hate people are doing in Yourcity, USA' are on the outs. On the other hand...Mysterious blocks of JavaScript? You have my attention...," Angela A. writes.


Sneak Peak: What Lives Beyond the Blue Screen

by in Announcements on

I’m totally stoked for what we have brewing for Halloween. It’s called What Lives Beyond the Blue Screen, and we’ve got a fun sneak peak for you:


Enumerating Your Failures

by in CodeSOD on

Rick was recently looking at some code from another team at his company. He noticed something odd in the code, so he pinged the team lead, Linda. “Did you spot this?”

“Oh, crap no,” Linda replied. “I should have caught this in code review, but I gotta be honest, Teddy is a bit… well, let’s just say I really should have caught that since I knew it was a Teddy commit.”


First Annual Developer Mentorship Survey

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Nearly fifteen years ago, I wrote Pounding A Nail: Old Shoe or Glass Bottle?. It opened by asking how one might respond to the following question:

A client has asked me to build and install a custom shelving system. I'm at the point where I need to nail it, but I'm not sure what to use to pound the nails in. Should I use an old shoe or a glass bottle?


Counting on Common Sense

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Matt enjoyed teaching. He mentored junior devs and interns with no technological backgrounds, and helped them to be experienced programmers. He believed that employers should hire based on attitude and then train employees up on skills.

That was before he met Derrick.


A Select System Call

by in CodeSOD on

Way back in the 90s, in an era when Swedish pop bands were getting regular US radio play and CVS was the optimal source control system, Alan worked on a remote-execution service for a “Unix-like” OS. One of his co-workers had just left the company, and Alan needed to track down a bug in a module which the co-worker had more-or-less owned during their tenure.

The specific block of C code in question looked roughly like this:


How Would You Rate Your Experience

by in CodeSOD on

The last time I was traveling, I noticed a little stand just past the security checkpoint, asking me to rate my experience. The five buttons ranged from a red frowny face to a green smiley, giving me the ability to respond with what must be the full range of human emotion. Every time I see one of those kiosks, I have to wonder: who uses those things, and who actually looks at the data?

Perhaps inspired by that kiosk, Peter's company does something similar. There's a Slack bot which messages each employee every two weeks to get them to evaluate, on a scale of 1-5, how good a certain aspect of their job is. That data gets collected up onto a Google Sheets dashboard. And yes, the Google Sheet is both the datastore and the dashboard, which isn't surprising at all.


Encoded for YOUR Benefit

by in Error'd on

"Oracle makes it easy! Just dereference this pointer to view your failed invoice," wrote Jeremy W.


A Context for Logging

by in CodeSOD on

When logging in Java, especially frameworks like Spring, making sure the logging statement has access to the full context of the operation in flight is important. Instead of spamming piles of logging statements in your business logic, you can use a “mapped diagnostic context” to cache useful bits of information during an operation, such that any logging statement can access it.

One of the tools for this is the “Mapped Data Context”, MDC. Essentially, it’s very much like a great big hash map that happens to be thread-local and is meant to be used by the logging framework. It’s a global-ish variable, but without the worst side effects of being global.


The Replacements

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Nobody wants to have a Bobby Tables moment in their database. So we need to to sanitize our inputs. Ted C noticed a bunch of stored procedures which contained lines like this:

  @scrubbed = fn_ScrubInput(fn_ScrubInput(@input))

Cast Away

by in CodeSOD on

The accountants at Gary's company had a problem: sometimes, when they wanted to check the price to ship a carton of product, that price was zero. No one had, as of yet, actually shipped product for free, but they needed to understand why certain cartons were showing up as having zero cost.

The table which tracks this, CartonFee, has three fields: ID, Carton, and Cost. Carton names are unique, and things like 12x3x6, or Box1, or even Large box. So, given a carton name, it should be pretty easy to update the cost, yes? The stored procedure which does this, spQuickBooks_UpdateCartonCost should be pretty simple.


I See What Happened

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Graham picked up a ticket regarding their password system. It seemed that several users had tried to put in a perfectly valid password, according to the rules, but it was rejected.

Graham's first step was to attempt to replicate on his own, but couldn't do it. So he followed up with one of the end users, and got them to reveal the password they had tried to use. That allowed him to trigger the bug, so he dug into the debugger to find the root cause.


The WTF Experience

by in Error'd on

"As it turns out, they've actually been singing Purple Haze before the start of all of those sportsball games," Adam writes.


Parse, Parse Again

by in CodeSOD on

Sometimes, a block of terrible code exists for a good reason. Usually, it exists because someone was lazy or incompetent, which while not a good reason, at least makes sense. Sometimes, it exists for a stupid reason.

Janet’s company recently bought another company, and now the new company had to be integrated into their IT operations. One of the little, tiny, minuscule known-issues in the new company’s system was that their logging was mis-configured. Instead of putting a new-line after each logging message, it put only a single space.


Driven to Substraction

by in Coded Smorgasbord on

Deon (previously) has some good news. His contract at Initrode is over, and he’s on his way out the door. But before he goes, he wants to share more of his pain with us.

You may remember that the StringManager class had a bunch of data type conversions to numbers and dates. Well guess what, there’s also a DateManager class, which is another 1600 lines of methods to handle dates.


Compiled Correctly

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Properly used, version history can easily help you track down and identify the source of a bug. Improperly used, it still can. As previously established, the chief architect Dana works with has some issues with source control.

Dana works on a large, complex embedded system. “Suddenly”, her team started to spot huge piles of memory corruption problems. Something was misbehaving, but it was hard to see exactly what.


Generically Bad

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The first two major releases of the .NET Framework, 1.0 and 1.1 were… not good. It's so long ago now that they're easily forgotten, but it's important to remember that a lot of core language features weren't in the framework until .NET 2.0.

Like generics. Generics haven't always been part of the language, but they've been in the language since 2006. The hope would be that, in the course of 13 years, developers would learn to use this feature.


An Error Storm of Monstrous Proportions

by in Error'd on

"Move over NOAA, Google News shows us, unfortunately after the fact that The Daily Beast is the TRUEST hurricane prognosticator," Alejandro D. writes.


The Windows Update

by in Feature Articles on

Every change breaks someones workflow.

A few years ago, Ian started at one of the many investment banks based out of London. This particular bank was quite proud of how they integrated “the latest technology” into all their processes, “favoring the bleeding edge,” and “are always focusing on Agile methods, and cross-functional collaboration.”


An Updated Version

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Some folks were perplexed by the fact that Microsoft skipped Windows 9 and went straight to Windows 10. The urban legend is that so many old applications checked which version of Windows was running by doing something like version.startsWith("Windows 9") to see if they were on 95 or 98, that Microsoft risked breaking otherwise working code if they released Windows 9.

But gone are those days of doing string munging to check which version of an OS we’re running on. We’ve got much better ways to check what features and functionality are available without having to parse strings out, right?


When Unique Isn't Unique

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Palm III 24

Gather 'round, young'uns, for a tale from the Dark Ages of mobile programming: the days before the iPhone launched. Despite what Apple might have you believe, the iPhone wasn't the first portable computing device. Today's submitter, Jack, was working for a company that streamed music to these non-iPhone devices, such as the Palm Treo or the Samsung Blackjack. As launch day approached for the new client for Windows Mobile 6, our submitter realized that he'd yet to try the client on a non-phone device (called a PDA, for those of you too young to recall). So he tracked down an HP iPaq on eBay just so he could verify that it worked on a device without the phone API.