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High-roller Matthew D. fears Finance. "This is from our corporate expense system. Will they flag my expenses in the April-December quarter as too high? And do we really need a search function for a list of 12 items?"
Nina's team has a new developer on the team. They're not a junior developer, though Nina wishes they could replace this developer with a junior. Inexperience is better than whatever this Java code is.
Apr 25Object[] test = (Object[]) options;
List<SchedulePlatform> schedulePlatformList = (List<SchedulePlatform>)((Object[])options)[0];
List<TableColumn> visibleTableCols = (List<TableColumn>)((Object[])options)[1];
Many nations have some form of national identification number, especially around taxes. Argentina is no exception.
Their "CUIT" (Clave Única de Identificación Tributaria) and "CUIL" (Código Único de Identificación Laboral) are formatted as "##-########-#".
Our anonymous submitter, whom we'll call Craig, worked for GlobalCon. GlobalCon relied on an offshore team on the other side of the world for adding/removing users from the system, support calls, ticket tracking, and other client services. One day at work, an urgent escalated ticket from Martin, the offshore support team lead, fell into Craig's queue. Seated before his cubicle workstation, Craig opened the ticket right away:
It's a holiday in the US today, so we're taking a long weekend. We flip back to a classic story of a company wanting to fill 15 different positions by hiring only one person. It's okay, Martin handles the database. Original - Remy
A curious email arrived in Phil's Inbox. "Windows Support Engineer required. Must have experience of the following:" and then a long list of Microsoft products.
Phil frowned. The location was convenient; the salary was fine, just the list of software seemed somewhat intimidating. Nevertheless, he replied to the agency saying that he was interested in applying for the position.
Underqualified Mike S. is suffering a job hunt. "I could handle uD83D and uDC77 well enough, but I am a little short of uD83C and the all important uDFFE requirement."
Mark sends us a very simple Java function which has the job of parsing an integer from a string. Now, you might say, "But Java has a built in for that, Integer.parseInt," and have I got good news for you: they actually used it. It's just everything else they did wrong.
private int makeInteger(String s)
{
int i=0;
try
{
Integer.parseInt(s);
}
catch (NumberFormatException e)
{
i=0;
return i;
}
i=Integer.parseInt(s);
return i;
}
Frank inherited some code that reads URLs from a file, and puts them into a collection. This is a delightfully simple task. What could go wrong?
static String[] readFile(String filename) {
String record = null;
Vector vURLs = new Vector();
int recCnt = 0;
try {
FileReader fr = new FileReader(filename);
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(fr);
record = new String();
while ((record = br.readLine()) != null) {
vURLs.add(new String(record));
//System.out.println(recCnt + ": " + vURLs.get(recCnt));
recCnt++;
}
} catch (IOException e) {
// catch possible io errors from readLine()
System.out.println("IOException error reading " + filename + " in readURLs()!\n");
e.printStackTrace();
}
System.out.println("Reading URLs ...\n");
int arrCnt = 0;
String[] sURLs = new String[vURLs.size()];
Enumeration eURLs = vURLs.elements();
for (Enumeration e = vURLs.elements() ; e.hasMoreElements() ;) {
sURLs[arrCnt] = (String)e.nextElement();
System.out.println(arrCnt + ": " + sURLs[arrCnt]);
arrCnt++;
}
if (recCnt != arrCnt++) {
System.out.println("WARNING: The number of URLs in the input file does not match the number of URLs in the array!\n\n");
}
return sURLs;
} // end of readFile()
Combining Java with lower-level bit manipulations is asking for trouble- not because the language is inadequate to the task, but because so many of the developers who work in Java are so used to working at a high level they might not quite "get" what they need to do.
Victor inherited one such project, which used bitmasks and bitwise operations a great deal, based on the network protocol it implemented. Here's how the developers responsible created their bitmasks:
Kate inherited a system where Java code generates JavaScript (by good old fashioned string concatenation) and embeds it into an output template. The Java code was written by someone who didn't fully understand Java, but JavaScript was also a language they didn't understand, and the resulting unholy mess was buggy and difficult to maintain.
Why trying to debug the JavaScript, Kate had to dig through the generated code, which led to this little representative line:
Whatever would we do without teamwork.
David doesn't know. "Microsoft Teams seems to have lost count (it wasn't a very big copy/paste)"
Andre has inherited a rather antique ASP .Net WebForms application. It's a large one, with many pages in it, but they all follow a certain pattern. Let's see if you can spot it.
protected void btnSearch_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
ArrayList paramsRel = new ArrayList();
paramsRel["Name"] = txtNome.Text;
paramsRel["Date"] = txtDate.Text;
Session["paramsRel"] = paramsRel;
List<Client> clients = Controller.FindClients();
//Some other code
}
Frequently in programming, we can make a tradeoff: use less (or more) CPU in exchange for using more (or less) memory. Lookup tables are a great example: use a big pile of memory to turn complicated calculations into O(1) operations.
So, for example, implementing itoa, the C library function for turning an integer into a character array (aka, a string), you could maybe make it more efficient using a lookup table.
Alexandar sends us some C# date handling code. The best thing one can say is that they didn't reinvent any wheels, but that might be worse, because they used the existing wheels to drive right off a cliff.
try
{
var date = DateTime.ParseExact(member.PubDate.ToString(), "M/d/yyyy h:mm:ss tt", null);
objCustomResult.PublishedDate = date;
}
catch (Exception datEx)
{
}
"Don't use exception handling for normal flow control," is generally good advice. But Andy's lead had a PhD in computer science, and with that kind of education, wasn't about to let good advice or best practices tell them what to do. That's why, when they needed to validate inputs, they wrote code C# like this:
public static bool IsDecimal(string theValue)
{
try
{
Convert.ToDouble(theValue);
return true;
}
catch
{
return false;
}
}
Mike V. shares a personal experience with the broadest version of Poe's Law: "Slashdot articles generally have a humorous quote at the bottom of their articles, but I can't tell if this displayed usage information for the fortune command, which provides humorous quotes, is a joke or a bug." To which I respond with the sharpest version of Hanlon's Razor: never ascribe to intent that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.
Early in my career, I had the misfortune of doing a lot of Crystal Reports work. Crystal Reports is another one of those tools that lets non-developer, non-database savvy folks craft reports. Which, like so often happens, means that the users dig themselves incredible holes and need professional help to get back out, because at the end of the day, when the root problem is actually complicated, all the helpful GUI tools in the world can't solve it for you.
Michael was in a similar position as I was, but for Michael, there was a five alarm fire. It was the end of the month, and a bunch of monthly sales reports needed to be calculated. One of the big things management expected to see was a year-over-year delta on sales, and they got real cranky if the line didn't go up. If they couldn't even see the line, they went into a full on panic and assumed the sales team was floundering and the company was on the verge of collapse.
…the average American, I think, has fewer than three friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it's like 15 friends or something, right?
- Mark Zuckerberg, presumably to one of his three friends
Since even the President of the United States is using ChatGPT to cheat on his homework and make bonkers social media posts these days, we need to have a talk about AI.
Loading times for web pages is one of the key metrics we like to tune. Users will put up with a lot if they feel like they application is responsive. So when Caivs was handed 20MB of PHP and told, "one of the key pages takes like 30-45 seconds to load. Figure out why," it was at least a clear goal.
Combing through that gigantic pile of code to try and understand what was happening was an uphill battle. Eventually, Caivs just decided to check the traffic logs while running the application. That highlighted a huge spike in traffic every time the page loaded, and that helped Caivs narrow down exactly where the problem was.
Alice picked up a ticket about a broken date calculation in a React application, and dropped into the code to take a look. There, she found this:
export function calcYears(date) {
return date && Math.floor((new Date() - new Date(date).getTime()) / 3.15576e10)
}
The lights are on here and the roof is intact and I'm grateful. Is anybody home? You decide.
Pharm fan Ian S. clucked "Perhaps they'll put those as dates on my headstone." If you're very lucky.
For testing networking systems, load simulators are useful: send a bunch of realistic looking traffic and see what happens as you increase the amount of sent traffic. These sorts of simulators often rely on being heavily multithreaded, since one computer can, if pushed, generate a lot of network traffic.
Thus, when Jonas inherited a heavily multithreaded system for simulating load, that wasn't a surprise. The surprise was that the developer responsible for it didn't really understand threading in Java. Probably in other languages too, but in this case, Java was what they were using.