Today’s anonymous submitter is an experienced Python developer. Their team is significantly less experienced. In the interests of training, someone suggested, “Perhaps we should buy books for everyone.” Our submitter was handed a stack of possible books, and asked to pick the best one to help the team mature.

One book spent some time discussing types, and the conversion between them. By way of example, it provided a handy method which would turn a string into a floating point number:

Last week we saw an attempt to reinvent the ceil function. Tina raised a protest: "6 lines to re-implement a ceil function? We can do better."

//Rounds to 1000d Superior
public int round1000dSup(int value_To_Round) {
    int finalResult = 0;
    int resultIntermediate = value_To_Round / 1000;
    resultIntermediate += 1;
    int valueRounded = resultIntermediate * 1000;
    if ((valueRounded - value_To_Round) == 1000) {
        finalResult = value_To_Round;
    } else {
        finalResult = valueRounded;
    }
    return finalResult;
}

Banks are uniquely identified via a “SWIFT Code”. It’s an ISO Standard. Having an accurate SWIFT code for a given bank is of vital importance to anyone doing financial transactions. With mergers, moves, new branches, and so on, the SWIFT codes you do business with won’t change often, but they will change.

Thus, Philip wasn’t terribly surprised when he got a request to update a pile of SWIFT codes. He couldn’t make the change via the database, though, as no one had permission to do that. He couldn’t edit it through an application UI, because no one had ever built one.

Clia was handed a pile of legacy code and told to upgrade it, but with a very important rule attached: the functionality couldn't change. Any change could break someone's workflow, and thus in the upgraded system, even the bugs had to be reproduced.

Unlike most "legacy" code, this wasn't all that old- it was written in C#. Then again, C# is old enough to drive, so maybe it is old. Regardless, C# has utility methods, like, say, a ceil function. At no point in C#'s history has it lacked this basic functionality.