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A single line of code from a large application that somehow manages to provide an almost endless insight into the pain that its maintainers face each day.

Mar 2025

Time for Identification

by in Representative Line on

If you need a unique ID, UUIDs provide a variety of options. It's worth noting that variants 1, 2, and 7 all incorporate a timestamp into the UUID. In the case of variant 7, this has the benefit of making the UUID sortable, which can be convenient in many cases (v1/v2 incorporate a MAC address which means that they're sortable if generated with the same NIC).

I bring this up because Dave inherited some code written by a "guru". Said guru was working before UUIDv7 was a standard, but also didn't have any problems that required sortable UUIDs, and thus had no real reason to use timestamp based UUIDs. They just needed some random identifier and, despite using C#, didn't use the UUID functions built in to the framework. No, they instead did this:

15 comments - Last comment @ 2025-03-27

Tern Down a Date

by in Representative Line on

Today's anonymous submitter has managed to find a way to do date formatting wrong that I don't think I've seen yet. That's always remarkable. Like most such bad code, it checks string lengths and then adds a leading zero, if needed. It's not surprising, but again, it's all in the details:

// convert date string to yyyy/MM/DD
return dtmValue.Year + "-" + ((dtmValue.Month.ToString().Length == 1)?  ("0" + dtmValue.Month.ToString()): dtmValue.Month.ToString()) + "-" + ((dtmValue.Day.ToString().Length == 1)? ("0" + dtmValue.Day.ToString()): dtmValue.Day.ToString());
18 comments - Last comment @ 2025-03-28

The Rounding Error

by in Representative Line on

At one point, someone noticed that some financial transactions weren't summing up correctly in the C# application Nancy supported. It didn't require Superman or a Peter Gibbons to figure out why: someone was using floating points for handling dollar amounts.

That kicked off a big refactoring project to replace the usage of double types with decimal types. Everything seemed to go well, at least until there was a network hiccup and the application couldn't connect to the database. Let's see if you can figure out what happened:

18 comments - Last comment @ 2025-03-25

Broken Up With

by in Representative Line on

Marco found this wreck, left behind by a former co-worker:

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28 comments - Last comment @ 2025-03-24
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