Recent Articles

Jul 2025

What a CAD

by in CodeSOD on

In my career, several times I've ended up being the pet programmer for a team of engineers and CNC operators, which frequently meant helping them do automation in their CAD tools. At its peak complexity, it resulted in a (mostly unsuccessful) attempt to build a lens/optics simulator in RhinoCAD.

Which brings us to the code Nick L sends us. It sounds like Nick's in a similar position: engineers write VB.Net code to control their CAD tool, and then Nick tries desperately to get them to follow some sort of decent coding practice. The result is code like:

11 comments - Last comment @ 14:00

Going on a teDa

by in CodeSOD on

Carlos G found some C++ that caused him psychic harm, and wanted to know how it ended up that way. So he combed through the history. Let's retrace the path with him.

Here was the original code:

10 comments - Last comment @ 12:35

IsValidToken

by in CodeSOD on

To ensure that several services could only be invoked by trusted parties, someone at Ricardo P's employer had the brilliant idea of requiring a token along with each request. Before servicing a request, they added this check:

private bool IsValidToken(string? token)
{
    if (string.Equals("xxxxxxxx-xxxxxx+xxxxxxx+xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx+xxxxx", token)) return true;
    return false;
}
13 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-30

An Exert Operation

by in CodeSOD on

The Standard Template Library for C++ is… interesting. A generic set of data structures and algorithms was a pretty potent idea. In practice, early implementations left a lot to be desired. Because the STL is a core part of C++ at this point, and widely used, it also means that it's slow to change, and each change needs to go through a long approval process.

Which is why the STL didn't have a std::map::containsfunction until the C++20 standard. There were other options. For example, one could usestd::map::count, to count how many times a key appear. Or you could use std::map::findto search for a key. One argument against adding astd::map::containsfunction is thatstd::map::count basically does the same job and has the same performance.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-30

It's Getting Hot in Here

by in Error'd on

Or cold. It's getting hot and cold. But on average... no. It's absolutely unbelievable.

"There's been a physics breakthrough!" Mate exclaimed. "Looking at meteoblue, I should probably reconsider that hike on Monday." Yes, you should blow it off, but you won't need to.

12 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-28

ConVersion Version

by in CodeSOD on

Mads introduces today's code sample with this line: " this was before they used git to track changes".

Note, this is not to say that they were using SVN, or Mercurial, or even Visual Source Safe. They were not using anything. How do I know?

20 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-30

JSONception

by in Representative Line on

I am on record as not particularly loving JSON as a serialization format. It's fine, and I'm certainly not going to die on any hills over it, but I think that as we stripped down the complexity of XML we threw away too much.

On the flip side, the simplicity means that it's harder to use it wrong. It's absent many footguns.

34 comments - Last comment @ 08:09

A Unique Way to Primary Key

by in CodeSOD on

"This keeps giving me a primary key violation!" complained one of Nancy's co-workers. "Screw it, I'm dropping the primary key constraint!"

That was a terrifying thing to hear someone say out loud. Nancy decided to take a look at the table before anyone did anything they'd regret.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-30

The Service Library Service

by in Feature Articles on

Adam's organization was going through a period of rapid growth. Part of this growth was spinning up new backend services to support new functionality. The growth would have been extremely fast, except for one thing applying back pressure: for some reason, spinning up a new service meant recompiling and redeploying all the other services.

Adam didn't understand why, but it seemed like an obvious place to start poking at something for improvement. All of the services depended on a library called "ServiceLib"- though not all of them actually used the library. The library was a set of utilities for administering, detecting, and interacting with services in their environment- essentially a homegrown fabric/bus architecture.

6 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-23

Nicknamed Nil

by in Error'd on

Michael R. is back with receipts. "I have been going to Tayyabs for >20 years. In the past they only accepted cash tips. Good to see they are testing a new way now."

18 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-22

Just a Few Updates

by in CodeSOD on

Misha has a co-worker who has unusual ideas about how database performance works. This co-worker, Ted, has a vague understanding that a SQL query optimizer will attempt to find the best execution path for a given query. Unfortunately, Ted has just enough knowledge to be dangerous; he believes that the job of a developer is to write SQL queries that will "trick" the optimizer into doing an even better job, somehow.

This means that Ted loves subqueries.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-18

National Exclamations

by in Representative Line on

Carlos and Claire found themselves supporting a 3rd party logistics package, called IniFreight. Like most "enterprise" software, it was expensive, unreliable, and incredibly complicated. It had also been owned by four different companies during the time Carlos had supported it, as its various owners underwent a series of acquisitions. It kept them busy, which is better than being bored.

One day, Claire asked Carlos, "In SQL, what does an exclamation point mean?"

22 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-18

Born Single

by in CodeSOD on

Alistair sends us a pretty big blob of code, but it's a blob which touches upon everyone's favorite design pattern: the singleton. It's a lot of Java code, so we're going to take this as chunks. Let's start with the two methods responsible for constructing the object.

The purpose of this code is to parse an XML file, and construct a mapping from a "name" field in the XML to a "batch descriptor".

12 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-28

Back Up for a Moment

by in CodeSOD on

James's team has a pretty complicated deployment process implemented as a series of bash scripts. The deployment is complicated, the scripts doing the deployment are complicated, and failures mid-deployment are common. That means they need to gracefully roll back, and they way they do that is by making backup copies of the modified files.

This is how they do that.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-16

Another One Rides the Bus

by in Error'd on

"Toledo is on Earth, Adrian must be on Venus," remarks Russell M. , explaining "This one's from weather.gov. Note that Adrian is 28 million miles away from Toledo. Being raised in Toledo, Michigan did feel like another world sometimes, but this is something else." Even Toledo itself is a good bit distant from Toledo. Definitely a long walk.

3 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-12

The Middle(ware) Child

by in Feature Articles on

Once upon a time, there was a bank whose business relied on a mainframe. As the decades passed and the 21st century dawned, the bank's bigwigs realized they had to upgrade their frontline systems to applications built in Java and .NET, but—for myriad reasons that boiled down to cost, fear, and stubbornness—they didn't want to migrate away from the mainframe entirely. They also didn't want the new frontline systems to talk directly to the mainframe or vice-versa. So they tasked old-timer Edgar with writing some middleware. Edgar's brainchild was a Windows service that took care of receiving frontline requests, passing them to the mainframe, and sending the responses back.

Edgar's middleware worked well, so well that it was largely forgotten about. It outlasted Edgar himself, who, after another solid decade of service, moved on to another company.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-11

The XML Dating Service

by in CodeSOD on

One of the endless struggles in writing reusable API endpoints is creating useful schemas to describe them. Each new serialization format comes up with new ways to express your constraints, each with their own quirks and footguns and absolute trainwrecks.

Maarten has the "pleasure" of consuming an XML-based API, provided by a third party. It comes with an XML schema, for validation. Now, the XML Schema Language has a large number of validators built in. For example, if you want to restrict a field to being a date, you can mark it's type as xsd:date. This will enforce a YYYY-MM-DD format on the data.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-14

Off Color

by in CodeSOD on

Carolyn inherited a somewhat old project that had been initiated by a "rockstar" developer, and then passed to developer after developer over the years. They burned through rockstars faster than Spinal Tap goes through drummers. The result is gems like this:

private void init(){
	ResourceHelper rh = new ResourceHelper();
	for ( int i = 0; i < 12; i++) {
		months[i] = rh.getResource("calendar."+monthkeys[i]+".long");
		months_s[i] = rh.getResource("calendar."+monthkeys[i]+".short");
	}
	StaticData data = SomeService.current().getStaticData();
	this.bankHolidayList = data.getBankHolidayList();
	colors.put("#dddddd", "#dddddd");
	colors.put("#cccccc", "#cccccc");
	colors.put("#e6e6e6", "#e6e6e6");
	colors.put("#ff0000", "#ffcccc");
	colors.put("#ffff00", "#ffffcc");
	colors.put("#00ff00", "#ccffcc");
	colors.put("#5050ff", "#ccccff");
	colors.put("#aa0000", "#ff9999");
	colors.put("#ff8000", "#ffcc99");
	colors.put("#99ff99", "#ccffcc");
	colors.put("#ffcc99", "#ffffcc");
	colors.put("#ff9966", "#ffcc99");
	colors.put("#00c040", "#99cc99");
	colors.put("#aadddd", "#ccffff");
	colors.put("#e0e040", "#ffff99");
	colors.put("#6699ff", "#99ccff");
}
17 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-12

All Locked Up

by in CodeSOD on

Dan was using a third-party database which provided a PHP API. At one point, Dan was running into an issue where he actually needed locks on the database. Fortunately for him, the vendor documentation told him that there was a method called obtainRowLock.

obtainRowLock($table, $where) - Attempt to lock a row, will escalate and lock the table if row locking is not supported, will escalate and lock the database if table locking is not supported; returns true on success, false on failure
$table - name of table to lock
$where - WHERE clause to define rows, ex: "WHERE id=52". If left empty, function will assume a table lock

14 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-15

Better Nate Than Lever

by in Error'd on

Happy Friday. For those of us in America, today is a political holiday. But let's avoid politics for the moment. Here's a few more wtfs.

"Error messages are hard," sums Ben Holzman , mock-replying "Your new puzzle games are fun, LinkedIn, but your error messages need a little work…"

12 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-07

The Last Last Name

by in CodeSOD on

Sometimes, you see some code which is perfectly harmless, but illustrates an incredibly dangerous person behind them. The code isn't good, but it isn't bad in any meaningful way, but it was written by a cocaine addled Pomeranian behind the controls of a bulldozer: it's full of energy, doesn't know exactly what's going on, and at some point, it's going to hit something important.

Such is the code which Román sends us.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-24

And Config

by in CodeSOD on

It's not unusual to store format templates in your application configuration files. I'd argue it's probably a good and wise thing to do. But Phillip inherited a C# application from a developer who "abandoned" it, and there were some choices in there.

<appSettings>
        <add key="xxxurl" value="[http://{1}:7777/pls/xxx/p_pristjek?i_type=MK3000{0}i_ean={3}{0}i_style=http://{2}/Content/{0}i_red=http://{2}/start.aspx/]http://{1}:7777/pls/xxx/p_pristjek?i_type=MK3000{0}i_ean={3}{0}i_style=http://{2}/Content/{0}i_red=http://{2}/start.aspx"/>
</appSettings>
15 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-04

It's Not Wrong to Say We're Equal

by in CodeSOD on

Aaron was debugging some C# code, and while this wasn't the source of the bug, it annoyed him enough to send it to us.

protected override int DoCompare(Item item1, Item item2)
{
	try
	{
		DateTime thisDate = ((DateField)item1.Fields["Create Date"]).DateTime;
		DateTime thatDate = ((DateField)item2.Fields["Create Date"]).DateTime;

		return thatDate.CompareTo(thisDate);
	}
	catch (Exception)
	{
		return 0; // Sorry, ran out of budget!
	}
}
18 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-07
Contact Privacy Policy RSS

Copyright © 2025 Inedo Publishing - v2024.9

Monitored by Panopta • Deployed with BuildMaster