The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Blanking Blank

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2019-03-28

Since the dawn of software development, people have endlessly been searching for a way to modularize their applications efficiently. From the “do one thing and do it well (and also everything is text)” protocols of Unix-style command line tools, through to modern microservices, the key idea has always been to have simple, easy to understand components which interface in simple, easy to understand ways. Complex things are built from piles of small, tiny things.

Matt W was working on one of those simple modules in a Big Complicated Thing. The Big Complicated Thing was an enterprise “do everything” tool, and like most enterprise tools, it was larger and more complicated than it needed to be. Also, everything talked to everything else in XML, the most enterprise of cross-component interfaces.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2019-04-02

This Is Your Brain on PL/SQL

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-03-27

The realest of real WTFs, the reigning champion for all eternity is and forever will be Oracle. Today, we’re going to take a look at a little code in PL/SQL.

PL/SQL is a weird language, a blend of SQL and, well, a Procedural Language, with a side of OO slapped on. The syntax does an excellent job giving you the feeling that it was designed in the 1970s, and each new feature or change to the language continues that tradition.

40 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-02

Doubly Encrypted Logins

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-03-26

Providing authentication for your web-based APIs is both a challenging problem but also a largely solved problem. The hardest part is really just working your way through the various options, and from there it’s usually some variation on a drop-in component.

Done properly, it’s also client-agnostic. I can access the service from my browser, I can access it from a thick client, I can access it from cURL. Done incorrectly, well, you get what happened to Amira.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2019-04-03

Swing and You're Out

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-03-21

George G was hired to do some UI work for a company which sold a suite of networking hardware. As networking hardware needs to be highly configurable, George was hired on to do “some minor tweaks” to the UI. “It’s just some sizing issues, fonts, the like. I’m sure you’ll do something to the stylesheets or whatever,” said the boss.

The boss didn’t know what they were talking about. The UI for some of the products was a web based config tool. That was their consumer-grade products. Their professional grade products used the same Java program which was originally released 15 years earlier. There were no stylesheets. Instead, there was an ancient and wobbling pile of Java Swing UI code, maintained by a “master” who had Strong Opinions™ about how that code should look.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2019-03-25

Remove This

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-03-20

Denae inherited some 90s-era GUI code. The original developers have long since gone away, and the source control history has vanished into oblivion. In the 90s, the Standard Template Library for C++ was still very new, so when Denae needs to debug things in this application, it means doing some code archaeology and picking through home-brewed implementations of common data structures.

Denae’s most recent bug involved understanding why some UI elements weren’t updating properly. The basic logic the application used is that it maintained a List of GUI items which need to be repainted. So Denae dug into the the List implementation.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2019-03-25

Exceptionally Serial

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2019-03-19

You may remember Kara, who recently found some "interesting" serialization code. Now, this code happens to be responsible for sending commands to pieces of machine equipment.

Low-level machine interfaces remain one of the domains where serial protocols rule. Serial communications use simple hardware and have minimal overhead, and something like RS232 has been in real-world use since the 60s. Sure, it's slow, sure it's not great with coping with noise, sure you have to jump through some hoops if you want a connection longer than 15m, but its failures are well understood.

36 comments - Last comment @ 2019-04-10

Ancient Grudges

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-03-14

Ignoring current events, England and the rest of Europe have had a number of historical conflicts which have left a number of grudges littered across the landscape.

Andro V lives in Norway, but is remotely collaborating with an English developer. That English developer wants their peers to know that Sweyn I and Thorkell the Tall’s invasions of southern England will never be forgotten.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2021-01-18

The Value of Your Code

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-03-12

“We know that governmental data-systems aren’t generally considered ‘cutting edge’ or ‘well architected’, but we’ve brought together some top flight talent, and we’re building a RESTful architecture that guarantees your code gets nice, easy-to-consume JSON objects.”

That’s what Oralee B. was told when she was hired to work on it. The system owned pretty much the entirety of the municipal data management market, tracking birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates and pet licenses for nearly every city in the country. JSON is so simple, how can you screw it up?

20 comments - Last comment @ 2019-03-13

The God Page

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-03-11

Mike inherited a data-driven application. Once upon a time, it started out pretty well architected. Yes, it was in PHP, but with good architecture, solid coding practices, and experienced developers, it was simple and easy to maintain.

Time passed. The architects behind it left, new developers were hired, management changed over, and it gradually drifted into what you imagine when you hear "PHP app" in 2019.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2019-03-12

Offensively Defensive Offense

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-03-07

Sometimes, the best defense is a good offense. Other times, the best offense is a good defense. And if you’re not sure which is which, you’ll never be a true strategic mastermind.

Tina’s co-worker understands that this is true for defensive programming. Always, always, always catch exceptions. That’s a good defense.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2019-03-11

Switching to Offshore

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-03-06

A lot of ink has been spilled talking about the perils and pitfalls of offshore development. Businesses love paying the wage arbitrage game, and shipping software development tasks to an outside vendor and paying half the wage they would for a dedicated employee.

Of course, the key difference is the word “dedicated”. You could have the most highly skilled offshore developer imaginable, but at the end of the day: they don’t care. They don’t care about you, or your business. They don’t care if their code is good or easy to maintain. They’re planning to copy-and-paste their way up the ranks of their business organization, and that means they want to get rotated off your contract onto whatever the next “plum” assignment is.

32 comments - Last comment @ 2019-03-13

Virtually Careful

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-03-05

Inheritance is one of those object-oriented features whose importance is perhaps overstated. When I was first being introduced to OO, it was a lot of “code reuse!” and “polymorphism!” and “code reuse!” In practice, inheritance is usually a way to tightly couple two different classes and create more headaches and rework in the future.

That’s why many OO languages favor interfaces, and why the classic Gang-of-Four patterns emphasize the importance of composition in many situations. And, because inheritance can make things complicated, most languages also require single parent inheritance.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2019-04-02

For Each Parallel

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-03-04

Parallel programming is hard. For all the advancements and tweaks we've made to our abstractions, for all the extra cores we've shoved into every CPU, deep down, software still carries the bias of the old uni-tasking model.

Aleksei P works on a software package that is heavily parallel. As such, when interviewing, he talks to candidates about their experience with .NET's Task objects and the async/await keywords.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-19