Let's say you saw a method called StrToGuid, in a C# codebase. Your first thought might be: "Wait, isn't there a built in parse? Well, I guess maybe they might do some sort of exception handling. But it still doesn't seem right." And then you'd take a look at the method signature and see that it takes both a string, and an integer named counter, and you'd think: "Wait, what?"

Henrik H had a similar experience. His team hired a new developer, someone with 15+ years of experience. This is what they contributed to the codebase:

"There are a few more functions like this in the same file," writes Jenny, about today's submission. This is one which largely does speak for itself.

const gright = () => {
  setIscountright(isCountright + 1);
  if(isCountright === 0) {
    setIsleft(!isLeft);
    setIsfirstdot(!isFirstdot);
    setIssecdot(!isSecdot);
    setInfof('Once activated buttons on the right panel will appear');
    setIssquareleft(!isSquareleft);
    setIsanimBottRightIn(!isAnimBottRightIn);
  }
  if(isCountright === 1) {
    setIssecdot(!isSecdot);
    setIsthirddot(!isThirdtdot);
    setInfof('Tap on them to change content of the projection on the wall');
    setIselmscale(!isElmscale);
    setIssquareleft(!isSquareleft);
    setIsmap(!isMap);
    setIsmapdot(!isMapdot);
    setIsborderwhite(!isBorderwhite);
  }
  if(isCountright === 2) {
    setIsright(!isRight);
    setIsthirddot(!isThirdtdot);
    setIsfourthdot(!isForthdot);
    setInfof('Use the menu bar in top left corner to switch between pages');
    setIssquareleft(isSquareleft);
    setIsanimBottRightIn(!isAnimBottRightIn);
    setIselmscale(!isElmscale);
    setIsmap(!isMap);
    setIsmapdot(!isMapdot);
    setIsborderwhite(!isBorderwhite);
    setIsindicator(!isIndicator);

    setTimeout(():void => {
      setAnimain(false);
      setMainsec(true);
      setIsindicator(false);
      setIsindicator2(true);
    }, 1000);

    setTimeout(():void => {
      setMainsec(false);
      setMainth(true);
      setIsindicator2(false);
      setIsindicator3(true);
      setShowdone(true);
    }, 2200);
  }
}

Austin's team received a bug report. When their C# application tried to load certain settings, it would crash. Now, since this was a pretty severe issue in their production software, impacting a fair number of customers, everyone on the team dove in.

It didn't take Austin long to spot the underlying problem, which isn't quite the WTF.

In the endless quest to get asynchronous operations right, we're constantly changing approaches. From callbacks, to promises, to awaits, to observables. Observables are pretty straight forward: we observe something, like a socket or a HTTP request, and when something happens, we trigger some callbacks. In a lightly pseudocode version, it might look something like:

requestFactory.postFormRequest(url).subscribe(
    resp => myResponseHandler(resp),
    err => myErrorHandler(err),
    () => myRequestCompleteHandler()
)

Lacy's co-worker needed to collect groups of strings into "clusters"- literally arrays of arrays of strings. Of great importance was knowing how many groups were in each cluster.

Making this more complicated, there was an array list of clusters. Obviously, there's a code smell just in this data organization- ArrayList<ArrayList<String[]>> is not a healthy sounding type name. There's probably a better way to express that.

Giles's company has a hard time with doing things in the database.

In today's example, they attempt the very challenging task of generating unique IDs in a SQL Server database. Now, what you're about to see follows the basic pattern of "generate a random number and see if it's already been used", which is a fairly common anti-pattern, but it's managed to do this in some of the worst ways I've ever seen. And it can't even hide behind the defense of being written a long time ago- it's a handful of years old.