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Code Snippet Of the Day (CodeSOD) features interesting and usually incorrect code snippets taken from actual production code in a commercial and/or open source software projects.
The position had sat open for months now; the department was straining under the load of too many projects and too few developers, but the pool of candidates was rapidly shrinking. So when Cindy found a resume that looked halfway decent, she immediately recommended tossing them a programming test and scheduling an interview.
“Hey,” Roberto said while pairing with an offshore programmer, “this problem would be easier to solve with the Factory pattern.”
“What’s that?”
Andy writes: “Operations reported that a query was taking a long time. Even the 'developers' of this query didn't know why it was taking a long time.”
I tell ya, folks… some submissions, you just set down and back away slowly… then hunt up a magnifying glass and a bottle of aspirin.
When hiring programmers, recruiters will often try to be “clever”. Sometimes, this results in a memorable trick, like EA Canada’s job posting billboard.
"Joey," asked Ross of the new contractor, in a slow, careful voice, as though trying to calm a large predator. "Explain to me why the data tree has this read-only flag?"
“If you want to put everything under test, you have to write code like this.”
At least, that’s what Alex’s co-worker said to him, when Alex demanded an explanation for this block of code.
Sally’s co-worker wanted to turn some data into HTML. It would flow from his application into client-side JavaScript which would build the DOM. He decided that it made sense to use a tree to represent the data as it’s translated.
The C# declaration of his tree looked something like this:
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When a system evolves and grows, it's usually necessary to identify various versions of software living in the wild. There are many ways to do that: some hide their version numbers in code, some keep them in configuration and metadata files, and others store them in the application's database.
Apr 15