Matthias sends us what he calls the "tern of the century". Which, before I share it with you: bad news, it's just a regular bad ternary. But it remains bad in interesting ways, so it's definitely worth talking about. But let's not oversell it.

private static String getOrderTypeCode(CreateOrderRequest order) {
  return !StringUtils.isBlank(order.getOrderParams().getReceivingCompanyFoo()) && ORDR_TP_DQQ_FOO.equals(order.getOrderParams().getOrderType()) ? ORDR_TP_DQQ_BAR_CDE : order.GetOrderParams().getOrderType().getOrderTypeCode();
}

Philipp H was going through some log files generated by their CI job to try and measure how long certain steps in the process took. He took the obvious path of writing code to read the logfiles, parse out the timestamps, and then take the difference between them.

Everything worked fine, until for certain steps, a negative timestamp was reported:

Today we have a true confession from Carl W. It has the benefit of being in R, which means that at a glance, I just assume "eh, looks fine to me." I guess I'm turning into Jimbo.

But let's dig into it. Carl's first snippet is this:

Frequent contributor Argle Bargle (recently, or even in last week's Errord) works with a programmer called "Jimbo". Jimbo is a solid co-worker and a good programmer. He has more tenure at the company than Argle, which means Jimbo is who Argle goes to when he has questions.

Recently, Argle worked his way through a rather complicated bit of code. It involved passing data between two different languages inside of a real-time system. Much of its functionality was opaque and complicated, so Argle wrote literal paragraphs of documentation explaining what the code did, how to invoke it, what the gotchas might be, and how to avoid them.