I've had the misfortune of working in places which did source-control via comments. Like one place which required that, with each section of code changed, you needed to add a comment with your name, the ticket number, and the reason the change was made. You know, the kind of thing you can just get from your source control service.

In their defense, that policy was invented for mainframe developers and then extended to everyone else, and their source control system was in Visual Source Safe. VSS was a) terrible, and b) a perennial destroyer of history, so maybe they weren't entirely wrong and VSS was the real WTF. I still hated it.

Antonio has an acquaintance has been seeking career advancement by proactively hunting down and fixing bugs. For example, in one project they were working on, there was a bug where it would incorrectly use MiB for storage sizes instead of MB, and vice-versa.

We can set aside conspiracy theories about HDD and RAM manufacturers lying to us about sizes by using MiB in marketing. It isn't relevant, and besides, its not like anyone can afford RAM anymore, with crazy datacenter buildouts. Regardless, which size to use, the base 1024 or base 1000, was configurable by the user, so obviously there was a bug handling that flag. Said acquaintance dug through, and found this:

While I'm not hugely fond of ORMs (I'd argue that relations and objects don't map neatly to each other, and any ORM is going to be a very leaky abstraction for all but trivial cases), that's not because I love writing SQL. I'm a big fan of query-builder tools; describe your query programatically, and have an API that generates the required SQL as a result. This cuts down on developer error, and also hopefully handles all the weird little dialects that every database has.

For example, did you know Postgres has an @> operator? It's a contains operation, which returns true if an array, range, or JSON dictionary contains your search term. Basically, an advanced "in" operation.

Arguably, the worst moment for date times was the shift from Julian to Gregorian calendars. The upgrade took a long time, too, as some countries were using the Julian calendar over 300 years from the official changeover, famously featured in the likely aprochryphal story about Russia arriving late for the Olympics.

At least that change didn't involve adding any extra months, unlike some of the Julian reforms, which involved adding multiple "intercalary months" to get the year back in sync after missing a pile of leap years.

A good C programmer can write C in any language, especially C++. A bad C programmer can do the same, and a bad C programmer will do all sorts of terrifying things in the process.

Gaetan works with a terrible C programmer.