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There has been a glut of date-related code in the inbox lately, so it’s always a treat where TRWTF isn’t how they fail to handle dates, and instead, something else. For example, imagine you’re browsing a PHP codebase and see something like:
May 20$fmtedDate = data::now();
Steve had been working as a web developer, but his background was in mathematics. Therefore, when a job opened up for internal transfer to the "Statistics" team, he jumped on it and was given the job without too much contest. Once there, he was able to meet the other "statisticians:" a group of well-meaning businessfolk with very little mathematical background who used The Spreadsheet to get their work done.
Alex A. wrote, "Vivaldi only has two words for you when you forget to switch back to your everyday browser for email after testing a website in Edge."
As we enjoy some summer weather, we should take a moment to reflect on how we communicate with our peers. We should always do it with kindness, even when we really want revenge. Original -- Kind regards, Remy
We write a lot about unhealthy workplaces. We, and many of our readers, have worked in such places. We know what it means to lose our gruntle (becoming disgruntled). Some of us, have even been tempted to do something vengeful or petty to “get back” at the hostile environment.
As we continue our vacation, this classic comes from the ancient year of 2007, when "used to being the only woman in my engineering and computer science classes" was a much more common phrase. Getting a job can feel competitive, but there are certain ways you can guarantee you're gonna lose that competition. Original --Remy
Today’s Tale from the Interview comes from Shanna...
Fresh out of college, and used to being the only woman in my engineering and computer science classes, I wasn't quite sure what to expect in the real world. I happily ended up finding a development job in a company which was nowhere near as unbalanced as my college classes had been. The company was EXTREMELY small and the entire staff, except the CEO, was in one office. I ended up sitting at a desk next to the office admin, another woman who was hired a month or two after me.
We continue to enjoy a brief respite from mining horrible code and terrible workplaces. This classic includes this line: "It requires that… Adobe Indesign is installed on the web server." Original --Remy
Have you ever thought what it would take for you to leave a new job after only a few days? Here's a fun story from my colleague Jake Vinson, whose co-worker of three days would have strongly answered "this."
One of the nice thing about externalizing connection strings is that it's easy to duplicate a database, duplicate the application's files, change the connection string to point to the new database, and bam, you've got a test environment.
Wow, it's summer. Already? We're taking a short break this week at TDWTF, and reaching back through the archives for some classic stories. If you've cancelled your road trip this year, make a vicarious stop at a filthy gas station with this old story. Original --Remy
“Staff augmentation,” was a fancy way of saying, “hey, contractors get more per hour, but we don’t have to provide benefits so they are cheaper,” but Stuart T was happy to get more per hour, and even happier to know that he’d be on to his next gig within a few months. That was how he ended up working for a national chain of gas-station/convenience stores. His job was to build a “new mobile experience for customer loyalty” (aka, wrapping their website up as an app that can also interact with QR codes).
At least, that’s what he was working on before Miranda stormed into his cube. “Stuart, we need your help. ProdTrack is down, and I can’t fix it, because I’ve got to be at a mandatory meeting in ten minutes.”
"He's not wrong. With wind and hail like this, an isolated tornado definitely ranks third in severity," Rob K. writes.
There are times when a code block needs a lot of setup, and there are some where it mostly speaks for itself. Today’s anonymous submitter found this JavaScript in a React application, coded by one of the senior team-members.
if (false === false){
startSingleBasedApp();
} else {
startTabNavigation();
}Here’s a puzzler for you: someone has written bad date handling code, but honestly, the bad date handling isn’t the real WTF. I mean, it’s bad, but it highlights something worse.
Ned inherited this method, along with a few others which we’ll probably look at in the future. It’s Java, so let’s just start with the method signature.
In a lot of legacy code, I've come across "integer dates". It's a pretty common way to store dates in a compact format: an integer in the form "YYYYMMDD", e.g., 20200616 It's relatively compact, it remains human readable (unlike a Unix epoch). It's not too difficult to play with the modulus and rounding operators to pick it back into date parts, if you need to, though mostly we'd use something like this as an ID-like value, or for sorting.
Thanks to Katie E I've learned about a new format: decimal years. The integer portion is the year, and the decimal portion is how far through that year you are, e.g. 2020.4547. This is frequently used in statistical modeling to manage time-series data. Once again, it's not meant to be parsed back into an actual date, but if you're careful, you can do it.
Our friend and frequent submitter Argle once taught evening classes in programming at his local community college. These classes tended to be small, around 20-30 students. Most of them were already programmers and were looking to expand their knowledge. Argle enjoyed helping them in that respect.
"Exactly which people are asking this question?" Jamie M. wrote.
A few years back, Mike worked at Initech. Initech has two major products: the Initech Creator and the Initech Analyzer. The Creator, as the name implied, let you create things. The Analyzer could take what you made with the Creator and test them.
For business reasons, these were two separate products, and it was common for one customer to have many more Creator licenses than Analyzer licenses, or upgrade them each on a different cadence. But the Analyzer depended on the Creator, so someone might have two wildly different versions of both tools installed.
Object-Relational-Mappers (ORMs) are a subject of pain, pleasure, and flamewars. On one hand, they make it trivially easy to write basic persistence logic, as long as it stays basic. But they do this by concealing the broader powers of relational databases, which means that an ORM is a leaky abstraction. Used incautiously or inappropriately, and they stop making your life easy, and make it much, much harder.
That’s bad, unless you’re Tenesha’s co-worker, because you apparently want to suffer.
Usually, when posting a representative line, it’s a line of code. Rarely, it’s been a “representative comment”.
Today’s submitter supplied some code, but honestly, the code doesn’t matter- it’s just some method signatures. The comment, however, is representative. Not just representative of this code, but honestly, all code, everywhere.
I recently caught up with an old co-worker from my first "enterprise" job. In 2007, I was hired to support an application which was "on its way out," as "eventually" we'd be replacing it with a new ERP. September 2019 was when it finally got retired.
Daniel M. writes, "How'd they make this mistake? Simple. You add the prices into the bowl and turn the mixer on."
Mike has a co-worker who’s better at Code Golf than I am. They needed to generate a table with 24 column headings, one for each hour of the day, formatted in HAM- the hour and AM/PM. As someone bad at code golf, my first instinct is honestly to use two for loops, but in practice I’d probably do a 24 iteration loop with a branch to decide if it’s AM/PM and handle it appropriately, as well as a branch to handle the fact that hour 0 should be printed as 12.
Which, technically, more or less what Mike’s co-worker did, but they did in in golf style, using PHP.
Back when it was new, one of the “great features” of Java was that it made working with threads “easy”. Developers learning the language were encouraged to get a grip right on threads right away, because that was the new thing which would make their programs so much better.
Well, concurrency is hard. Or, to put it another way, “I had a problem, so I decided to use threads. prhave twI Now o oblems.”
Back when I was still working for a large enterprise company, I did a lot of code reviews. This particular organization didn’t have much interest in code quality, so a lot of the code I was reviewing was just… bad. Often, I wouldn’t even need to read the code to see that it was bad.
In the olden times, inconsistent or unclear indentation was a great sign that the code would be bad. As IDEs started automating indentation, you lost that specific signal, but gained a new one. You can just tell code is bad when it’s shaped like this:
It's fair to say that regardless of their many advantages, "systems languages", like C, are much harder to use than their more abstract cousins.Vendors know this, which is why they often find a way to integrate across language boundaries. You might write critical functions in C or C++, then invoke them in Python or from Swift or… Visual Basic 6.
And crossing those language boundaries can pose other challenges. For example, Python has a built-in boolean type. C, for quite a long time didn't. Which means a lot of C code has blocks like this:
