In theory, HTTP status codes should be easy to work with. In the 100s? You're doing some weird stuff and breaking up large requests into multiple sub-requests. 200s? It's all good. 300s? Look over there. 400s? What the hell are you trying to do? 500s? What the hell is the server trying to do?

This doesn't mean people don't endlessly find ways to make it hard. LinkedIn, for example, apparently likes to send 999s if you try and view a page without being logged in. Shopify has invented a few. Apache has added a 218 "This is Fine". And then there's WebDAV, which not only adds new status codes, but adds a whole bunch of new verbs to HTTP requests.

For months, everything at Yusuf's company was fine. Then, suddenly, he comes in to the office to learn that overnight the log exploded with thousands of panic messages. No software changes had been pushed, no major configurations had happened- just a reboot. What had gone wrong?

This particular function was invoked as part of the application startup:

Andreas found this in a rather large, rather ugly production code base.

private static void LogView(object o)
{
    try
    {
        ArrayList al = (ArrayList)o;
        int pageId = (int)al[0];
        int userId = (int)al[1];

        // ... snipped: Executing a stored procedure that stores the values in the database
    }
    catch (Exception) { }
}

Ronan works with a vibe coder- an LLM addicted developer. This is a type of developer that's showing up with increasing frequency. Their common features include: not reading the code the AI generated, not testing the code the AI generated, not understanding the context of the code or how it integrates into the broader program, and absolutely not bothering to follow the company coding standards.

Here's an example of the kind of Python code they were "writing":

JavaScript is frequently surprising in terms of what functions it does not support. For example, while it has a Math.round function, that only rounds to the nearest integer, not an arbitrary precision. That's no big deal, of course, as if you wanted to round to, say, four decimal places, you could write something like: Math.floor(n * 10000) / 10000.

But in the absence of a built-in function to handle that means that many developers choose to reinvent the wheel. Ryan found this one.

We've discussed singleton abuse as an antipattern many times on this site, but folks keep trying to find new ways to implement them badly. And Olivia's co-worker certainly found one.

We start with a C++ utility class with a bunch of functions in it: