Recent Articles

Dec 2020

Best of 2020: Web Server Installation

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While this year has felt endless, there are projects which will feel like they take forever. As we wrap up our tour of the best of 2020, let's visit an endless project. Original -- Remy

Connect the dots puzzle

Once upon a time, there lived a man named Eric. Eric was a programmer working for the online development team of a company called The Company. The Company produced Media; their headquarters were located on The Continent where Eric happily resided. Life was simple. Straightforward. Uncomplicated. Until one fateful day, The Company decided to outsource their infrastructure to The Service Provider on Another Continent for a series of complicated reasons that ultimately benefited The Budget.


Best of 2020: Science Is Science

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You do not need formal training from a compsci program or similar before you're allowed to be a developer. But sometimes, when your job role already contains "engineer" in the title, people think you can handle any engineering task. As we continue our review of the best of 2020, here's a tale of misapplied human resources. Original --Remy

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.


Best of 2020: The Time-Delay Footgun

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As we revisit the best articles of 2020, have you been wondering why 2020 has been such a… colorful year? Maybe the developer responsible wrote a bad version check. Original --Remy

A few years back, Mike worked at Initech. Initech has two major products: the Initech Creator and the Initech Analyzer. The Creator, as the name implied, let you create things. The Analyzer could take what you made with the Creator and test them.

For business reasons, these were two separate products, and it was common for one customer to have many more Creator licenses than Analyzer licenses, or upgrade them each on a different cadence. But the Analyzer depended on the Creator, so someone might have two wildly different versions of both tools installed.


Best of 2020: Copy/Paste Culture

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As per usual, we'll be spending a few days looking back at some of our favorite stories of the year. We start with a visit to a place where copy/pasting isn't just common, it's part of the culture. Original -- Remy

Mark F had just gone to production on the first project at his new job: create a billables reconciliation report that an end-user had requested a few years ago. It was clearly not a high priority, which was exactly why it was the perfect items to assign a new programmer.

"Unfortunately," the end user reported, "it just doesn't seem to be working. It's running fine on test, but when I run it on the live site I'm getting a SELECT permission denied on the object fn_CalculateBusinessDays message. Any idea what that means?"


Classic WTF: 2012

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As we enjoy our holiday today, in this seemingly unending year of 2020, our present to you is a blast from 2012, the year the world was supposed to end. Original --Remy

"Most people spend their New Year's Eve watching the ball drop and celebrating the New Year," writes Jason, "and actually, that's what I planned to do, too. Instead, I found myself debugging our licensing activation system." "Just as I was about to leave the office, I received a torrent of emails with the subject 'License Activation Failed'. One or two every now and then is expected, but dozens and dozens at four o'clock on New Year's Eve... not so good. It took me a moment to realize the significance of 4:00PM, but then it hit me: I'm on Pacific Time, which is UTC -8 hours.

"The error message that was filling up our logs was simply 'INVALID DATE' and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why. Our license code was a 32-bit number that represented the expiration date of the license and the features in the license. 7 of those bits represented the year since 2000, so obviously the date was fine up until 2127. After hours and hours of digging through PL/SQL, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, and some random shell scripts, I found the following.


Classic WTF: Developer Carols

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It's the holiday season, which means over the next few days, we'll be reviewing some of the best of 2020, if anything about 2020 can be considered "the best", and maybe some other surprises. To kick things off, we're going to pull from the faroff year of Christmas 2017, and return to our Developer Carols. That year, we ran them too late to go caroling, and this year, nobody outside of New Zealand should be going caroling, keeping with our tradition of meeting the requirements but delivering absolutely no value. (Original)
Árbol navideño luminoso en Madrid 02

It’s Christmas, and thus technically too late to actually go caroling. Like any good project, we’ve delivered close enough to the deadline to claim success, but late enough to actually be useless for this year!

Still, enjoy some holiday carols specifically written for our IT employees. Feel free to annoy your friends and family for the rest of the day.

Push to Prod (to the tune of Joy To the World)


What the Fun Holiday Activity: A Visit From "Coding Cats"?

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Thanks again to everyone who submitted a holiday tale for our What the Fun Holiday special. Like all good holiday traditions, our winner indulges in a bit of nostalgia for a Christmas classic, by adapting the classic "A Visit From St. Nicolas", a trick we've done ourselves. But like a good WTF, Lee R also mixes in some frustration and anger, and maybe a few inside jokes that we're all on the outside of. Still, for holiday spirit, this tale can't be beat.

Now, our normal editorial standards avoid profanity, but in the interests of presenting the story as Lee submitted it, we're going to suspend that rule for today. It is, after all, the holidays, and we're all miserable.



What the Fun Holiday Activity: The Gift of the Consultant and The Holiday Push

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As we roll into the last few days before Christmas, it's time to share what our readers sent in for our "What the Fun Holiday" contest. It was a blast going through the submissions to see what our holiday experiences looked like.

Before we dig in to our contest winners, our first honorable mention is to David N, who shared with us "The Worm Before Christmas", a classic from 1988 that was new to us.



All About the Details

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Dora's AngularJS team (previously) wanted to have their display be "smart" enough to handle whether or not you were editing a list of "Users" or just one "User", so they implemented a function to turn a plural word into a singular word.

Which, of course, we already know the WTF implementation of it: they just chop off the last letter. So "Potatoes" becomes "Potatoe", "Moose" becomes the noise cows make, and I'm just left saying "oh, gees". But they managed to make it worse than that.


Something Has Gone Wrong

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"Ooh! That moment when you're listening to music and a you get a vague pop up message that fills you with existential dread," writes Noah B.


All the Angles

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Web frameworks are a double edged sword. They are, as a rule, bloated, complicated, opinionated and powerful. You can get a lot done, so long as you stick to the framework's "happy path", and while you can wander off and probably make it work, there be dragons. You also run into a lot of developers who, instead of learning the underlying principles, just learn the framework. This means they might not understand broader web development, but can do a lot with Angular.

And then you might have developers who don't understand broader web development or the framework they're using.


Stringing Your Date Along

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One of the best parts of doing software development is that you're always learning something new. Like, for example, I thought I'd seen every iteration on bad date handling code. But today, I learned something new.

Katharine picked up a pile of tickets, all related to errors with date handling. For months, the code had been running just fine, but in November there was an OS upgrade. "Ever since," the users complained, "it's consistently off by a whole month!" This was a bit of a puzzle, as there's nothing in an OS upgrade that should cause date strings to be consistently off by a whole month. Clearly, there must be a bug, but why did it only now start happening? Katharine pulled up the C code, and checked.


Drop into the Deep End

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Would you like to guarantee your project ends up on this site? Antoon's employer has a surefire technique. First, hire a freshly graduated architect with no programming experience. Second, chuck them into a project in a programming language they don't know. Third, give them absolutely no supervision and no guidance or support, and watch what happens.

<?php function copy_tables($table1, $table2, $copy, $size, $link, $action, $testOper) { global $link; //global so we can retrieve it in the fuction "update" global $result; global $timezone; $result[1] = $copy; if ($size = 'EXIST') { $queryz0 = "drop table if exists $table1"; $requestz0 = db_query($queryz0, $link) or error_log("copy_tables *** $table1 : Error in the execution of request z0", db_error() , $action, $testOper) . "\n"; if ($result[1] == "error") { exit; } $queryz1 = "create table $table1 LIKE $table2"; $requestz1 = db_query($queryz1, $link) or error_log("copy_tables *** $table1 : Error in the execution of request z1", db_error() , $action, $testOper) . "\n"; if ($result[1] == "error") { exit; } } elseif ($size = 'NOTEXIST') { $queryz2 = "create table if not exists $table1 LIKE $table2"; $requestz2 = db_query($queryz2, $link) or error_log("copy_tables *** $table1 : Error in the execution of request z2", db_error() , $action, $testOper) . "\n"; if ($result[1] == "error") { exit; } } $queryz3 = "insert $table1 select * from $table2"; $requestz3 = db_query($queryz3, $link) or error_log("copy_tables *** $table1 : Error in the execution of request z3", db_error() , $action, $testOper) . "\n"; if ($result[1] == "error") { exit; } } ?>

Count on Me

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There is no task so simple that a developer can't find a harder, more wasteful, and pointless way to do it. For example, let's say you want to know how many rows are in a data grid object?

Hans found this C# snippet in production a few years ago:


One of These Must Be Correct

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"Walmart seems to think if they throw enough time estimates at the user, one of them is bound to be close...probably," Joe wrote.


The Secret is… … … … Timing

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Scott was new to the team, and so when a seemingly simple bug came in, he picked up the ticket. It should be an easy win, and help him get more familiar with the code base.

The reported problem was that a user entered the time, and saved it. Several screens later, when that time was redisplayed, it was incorrect, off by some number of hours. Clearly, it was a small timezone issue, which should be easy to fix.


Passive Regressions

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Sometimes, our readers send us a story. Sometimes they send us some bad code. Sometimes, they just need a place to vent their frustrations. Paul T had some frustrations. Paul's team is migrating from .Net to .NetCore, and as one might imagine, that creates a lot of build failures.

Their Team City build environment sometimes doesn't give the most helpful messages:


Going with the Flow

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The power of a good devops team is that you can get fast, reliable, and repeatable deployments. It lays out a foundation for rapid iteration and quick releases. With that in mind, Lakeisha was pretty excited to start a new job working in devops.

She walked in the door, with visions of well architected, scripted flows, robust automated testing, and strict architectural guidelines. About fifteen minutes in, she learn that FISI guided their entire devops workflow. If it worked, it worked.


Mandatory Confusion

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Mighty gnarled tree (Unsplash)

CorpCo was a small company; it consisted of Tymeria, the president, and two programmers, Kylie and Ronnie. Kylie had seniority, having been working there for 6 or 7 years, but Ronnie, our submitter, had been working there a hefty 4 years herself. The company purchased a legacy VB web app from a client company, AClientCompany; AClientCompany had been working on the app for 15 years, with their lead programmer Michelle as the sole programmer. The app had been written in classic ASP using VBScript, though at some point Michelle had begun converting the project to ASP.NET with VB.NET. (Did you know you can mix and match classic ASP with ASP.NET and classic VBScript with VB.NET in the same solution? I didn't!). Of course, the app was riddled with security vulnerabilities, copypasta, and spaghetti code. One main class, called DBFunctions.vb, was over 30,000 lines!


What the Fun Holiday Activity?

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You've got one week left to teach us the real meaning of WTFmas. What's your holiday tale that we'll revisit winter after winter?

Can you teach us the true meaning of WTFMas?

What We Want


Mandatory Pants Day

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"I wonder if the people behind the ad campaign ever said they could 'sell ice to a snowman'," Loren writes.


WWJSD?

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A few months ago, Lee was reviewing a pull request from Eddie. Eddie was a self-appointed "rockstar" developer. Eddie might be a "junior" developer in job title, but they're up on the latest, greatest, bestest practices, and if everyone would just get out of Eddie's way, the software would get so much better.

Which is why the pull request Lee was looking at touched nearly every file. Every change was some variation of this:


A New Bean

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Roasted coffee beans

It was Paramdeep's first corporate IT job. He was assigned a mentor, Rajiv, who would train him up on the application he would be supporting: a WebSphere-based Java application full of Enterprise Java Beans.


A Tight Fitter

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Part of the pitch of Python is that it's a language which values simplicity and ease of use. Whether it lives up to that pitch is its own discussion, but the good news is that if you really want to create really complex code with loads of inheritance and nasty interrelationships, you can.

Today's anonymous submitter started out by verifying some of the math in some extremely math-y analytical code. Previously, they'd had problems where the documentation and the code were subtly different, so it was important that they understood exactly what the code was doing.