The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

A Poor Facsimile

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-09-30

For every leftpad debacle, there are a thousand “utility belt” libraries for JavaScript. Whether it’s the “venerable” JQuery, or lodash, or maybe Google’s Closure library, there’s a pile of things that usually end up in a 50,000 line util.js file available for use, and packaged up a little more cleanly.

Dan B had a co-worker who really wanted to start using Closure. But they also wanted to be “abstract”, and “loosely coupled”, so that they could swap out implementations of these utility functions in the future.

9 comments - Last comment @ 2020-11-06

Taking Your Chances

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-09-29

A few months ago, Sean had some tasks around building a front-end for some dashboards. Someone on the team picked a UI library for managing their widgets. It had lovely features like handling flexible grid layouts, collapsing/expanding components, making components full screen and even drag-and-drop widget rearrangement.

It was great, until one day it wasn't. As more and more people started using the front end, they kept getting more and more reports about broken dashboards, misrendering, duplicated widgets, and all sorts of other difficult to explain bugs. These were bugs which Sean and the other developers had a hard time replicating, and even on the rare occassions that they did replicate it, they couldn't do it twice in a row.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2020-10-02

A Generic Comment

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-09-24

To my mind, code comments are important to explain why the code what it does, not so much what it does. Ideally, the what is clear enough from the code that you don’t have to. Today, we have no code, but we have some comments.

Chris recently was reviewing some C# code from 2016, and found a little conversation in the comments, which may or may not explain whats or whys. Line numbers included for, ahem context.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2021-04-23

A Random While

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-09-23

A bit ago, Aurelia shared with us a backwards for loop. Code which wasn’t wrong, but was just… weird. Well, now we’ve got some code which is just plain wrong, in a number of ways.

The goal of the following Java code is to generate some number of random numbers between 1 and 9, and pass them off to a space-separated file.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-25

A Cutt Above

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-09-22

We just discussed ViewState last week, and that may have inspired Russell F to share with us this little snippet.

    private ConcurrentQueue<AppointmentCuttOff> lstAppointmentCuttOff
    {
        get
        {
            object o = ViewState["lstAppointmentCuttOff"];
            if (o == null)
                return null;
            else
                return (ConcurrentQueue<AppointmentCuttOff>)o;
        }
        set
        {
            ViewState["lstAppointmentCuttOff"] = value;
        }
    }

31 comments - Last comment @ 2020-10-19

Exceptional Standards Compliance

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-09-21

When we're laying out code standards and policies, we are, in many ways, relying on "policing by consent". We are trying to establish standards for behavior among our developers, but we can only do this with their consent. This means our standards have to have clear value, have to be applied fairly and equally. The systems we build to enforce those standards are meant to reduce conflict and de-escalate disagreements, not create them.

But that doesn't mean there won't always be developers who resist following the agreed upon standards. Take, for example, Daniel's co-worker. Their CI process also runs a static analysis step against their C# code, which lets them enforce a variety of coding standards.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-28

Get My Switch

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-09-16

You know how it is. The team is swamped, so you’ve pulled on some junior devs, given them the bare minimum of mentorship, and then turned them loose. Oh, sure, there are code reviews, but it’s like, you just glance at it, because you’re already so far behind on your own development tasks and you’re sure it’s fine.

And then months later, if you’re like Richard, the requirements have changed, and now you’ve got to revisit the junior’s TypeScript code to make some changes.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-22

//article title here

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-09-15

Menno was reading through some PHP code and was happy to see that it was thoroughly commented:

function degToRad ($value)
{
    return $value * (pi()/180); // convert excel timestamp to php date
}

33 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-28

A Nice Save

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-09-14

Since HTTP is fundamentally stateless, developers have found a million ways to hack state into web applications. One of my "favorites" was the ASP.NET ViewState approach.

The ViewState is essentially a dictionary, where you can store any arbitrary state values you might want to track between requests. When the server outputs HTML to send to the browser, the contents of ViewState are serialized, hashed, and base-64 encoded and dumped into an <input type="hidden"> element. When the next request comes in, the server unpacks the hidden field and deserializes the dictionary. You can store most objects in it, if you'd like. The goal of this, and all the other WebForm state stuff was to make handling web forms more like handling forms in traditional Windows applications.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-22

Put a Dent in Your Logfiles

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-09-10

Valencia made a few contributions to a large C++ project run by Harvey. Specifically, there were some pass-by-value uses of a large data structure, and changing those to pass-by-reference fixed a number of performance problems, especially on certain compilers.

“It’s a simple typo,” Valencia thought. “Anyone could have done that.” But they kept digging…

37 comments - Last comment @ 2023-10-06

Sleep on It

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-09-08

If you're fetching data from a remote source, "retry until a timeout is hit" is a pretty standard pattern. And with that in mind, this C++ code from Auburus doesn't look like much of a WTF.

bool receiveData(uint8_t** data, std::chrono::milliseconds timeToWait) {
    start = now();
    while ((now() - start) < timeToWait) {
         if (/* successfully receive data */) {
             return true;
         }
         std::this_thread::sleep_for(100ms);
    }
    return false;
}

11 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-17

Classic WTF: Covering All Cases… And Then Some

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2020-09-07

It's Labor Day in the US, where we celebrate the labor movement and people who, y'know, do actual work. So let's flip back to an old story, which does a lot of extra work. Original -- Remy

Ben Murphy found a developer who liked to cover all of his bases ... then cover the dug-out ... then the bench. If you think this method to convert input (from 33 to 0.33) is a bit superflous, you should see data validation.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-10

Learning the Hard Way

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-09-03

If you want millions in VC funding, mumble the words “machine learning” and “disruption” and they’ll blunder out of the woods to just throw money at your startup.

At its core, ML is really about brute-forcing a statistical model. And today’s code from Norine could have possibly been avoided by applying a little more brute force to the programmer responsible.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-04

Unknown Purpose

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-09-01

Networks are complex beasts, and as they grow, they get more complicated. Diagnosing and understanding problems on networks rapidly gets hard. “Fortunately” for the world, IniTech ships one of those tools.

Leonore works on IniTech’s protocol analyzer. As you might imagine, a protocol analyzer gathers a lot of data. In the case of IniTech’s product, the lowest level of data acquisition is frequently sampled voltage measurements over time. And it’s a lot of samples- depending on the protocol in question, it might need samples on the order of nanoseconds.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-21

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