Recent Articles

Apr 2025

Find the First Function to Cut

by in CodeSOD on

Sebastian is now maintaining a huge framework which, in his words, "could easily be reduced in size by 50%", especially because many of the methods in it are reinvented wheels that are already provided by .NET and specifically LINQ.

For example, if you want the first item in a collection, LINQ lets you call First() or FirstOrDefault() on any collection. The latter option makes handling empty collections easier. But someone decided to reinvent that wheel, and like so many reinvented wheels, it's worse.

6 comments - Last comment @ 12:55

The Wrong Kind of Character

by in CodeSOD on

Today's code, at first, just looks like using literals instead of constants. Austin sends us this C#, from an older Windows Forms application:

if (e.KeyChar == (char)4) {   // is it a ^D?
        e.Handled = true;
        DoStuff();
}
else if (e.KeyChar == (char)7) {   // is it a ^g?
        e.Handled = true;
        DoOtherStuff();
}
else if (e.KeyChar == (char)Keys.Home) {
        e.Handled = true;
        SpecialGoToStart();
}
else if (e.KeyChar == (char)Keys.End) {
        e.Handled = true;
        SpecialGoToEnd();
}
14 comments - Last comment @ 16:31

Objectifying Yourself

by in CodeSOD on

"Boy, stringly typed data is hard to work with. I wish there were some easier way to work with it!"

This, presumably, is what Gary's predecessor said. Followed by, "Wait, I have an idea!"

10 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-29

Que Sera, Sera

by in Error'd on

It's just the same refrain, over and over.

"Time Travel! Again?" exclaimed David B. "I knew that Alaska is a good airline. Now I get to return at the start of a century. And not this century. The one before air flight began." To be fair, David, there never is just one first time for time travel. It's always again, isn't it?

24 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-28

Tangled Up in Foo

by in CodeSOD on

DZ's tech lead is a doctor of computer science, and that doctor loves to write code. But you already know that "PhD" stands for "Piled high and deep", and that's true of the tech lead's clue.

For example, in C#:

10 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-25

Dating in Another Language

by in CodeSOD on

It takes a lot of time and effort to build a code base that exceeds 100kloc. Rome wasn't built in a day; it just burned down in one.

Liza was working in a Python shop. They had a mildly successful product that ran on Linux. The sales team wanted better sales software to help them out, and instead of buying something off the shelf, they hired a C# developer to make something entirely custom.

19 comments - Last comment @ 07:47

XJSOML

by in Feature Articles on

When Steve's employer went hunting for a new customer relationship management system (CRM), they had some requirements. A lot of them were around the kind of vendor support they'd get. Their sales team weren't the most technical people, and the company wanted to push as much routine support off to the vendor as possible.

But they also needed a system that was extensible. Steve's company had many custom workflows they wanted to be able to execute, and automated marketing messages they wanted to construct, and so wanted a CRM that had an easy to use API.

9 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-23

The Variable Toggle

by in CodeSOD on

A common class of bad code is the code which mixes server side code with client side code. This kind of thing:

<script>
    <?php if (someVal) { ?>
        var foo = <? echo someOtherVal ?>;
    <?php } else { ?>
        var foo = 5;
    <?php } ?>
</script>
9 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-25

Hot Dog

by in Error'd on

Faithful Peter G. took a trip. "So I wanted to top up my bus ticket online. After asking for credit card details, PINs, passwords, a blood sample, and the airspeed velocity of an unladen European swallow, they also sent a notification to my phone which I had to authorise with a fingerprint, and then verify that all the details were correct (because you can never be too careful when paying for a bus ticket). So yes, it's me, but the details definitely are not correct." Which part is wrong, the currency? Any idea what the exchange rate is between NZD and the euro right now?

11 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-21

Static State

by in CodeSOD on

Today's Anonymous submitter was reviewing some C++ code, and saw this perfectly reasonable looking pattern.

class SomeClass
{
public:
	void setField(int val);
	int getField();
}
10 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-24

Conventional Events

by in CodeSOD on

Now, I would argue that the event-driven lifecycle of ASP .Net WebForms is a bad way to design web applications. And it's telling that the model is basically dead; it seems my take is at best lukewarm, if not downright cold.

Pete inherited code from Bob, and Bob wrote an ASP .Net WebForm many many ages ago, and it's still the company's main application. Bob may not be with the company, but his presence lingers, both in the code he wrote and the fact that he commented frequently with // bob was here

6 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-17

Message Oriented Database

by in CodeSOD on

Mark was debugging some database querying code, and got a bit confused about what it was actually doing. Specifically, it generated a query block like this:

$statement="declare @status int
        declare @msg varchar(30)
        exec @status=sp_doSomething 'arg1', ...
        select @msg=convert(varchar(10),@status)
        print @msg
        ";

$result = sybase_query ($statement, $this->connection);
5 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-21

A Single Mortgage

by in Feature Articles on

We talked about singletons a bit last week. That reminded John of a story from the long ago dark ages where we didn't have always accessible mobile Internet access.

At the time, John worked for a bank. The bank, as all banks do, wanted to sell mortgages. This often meant sending an agent out to meet with customers face to face, and those agents needed to show the customer what their future would look like with that mortgage- payment calculations, and pretty little graphs about equity and interest.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-18

Sentinel Headline

by in Error'd on

When faced with an information system lacking sufficient richness to permit its users to express all of the necessary data states, human beings will innovate. In other words, they will find creative ways to bend the system to their will, usually (but not always) inconsequentially.

In the early days of information systems, even before electronic computers, we found users choosing to insert various out-of-bounds values into data fields to represent states such as "I don't know the true value for this item" or "It is impossible accurately state the true value of this item because of faulty constraint being applied to the input mechanism" or other such notions.

13 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-14

A Steady Ship

by in CodeSOD on

You know what definitely never changes? Shipping prices. Famously static, despite all economic conditions and the same across all shipping providers. It doesn't matter where you're shipping from, or to, you know exactly what the price will be to ship that package at all times.

Wait, what? You don't think that's true? It must be true, because Chris sent us this function, which calculates shipping prices, and it couldn't be wrong, could it?

27 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-15

Single or Mingle

by in CodeSOD on

Singletons is arguably the easiest to understand design pattern, and thus, one of the most frequently implemented design patterns, even- especially- when it isn't necessary. Its simplicity is its weakness.

Bartłomiej inherited some code which implemented this pattern many, many times. None of them worked quite correctly, and all of them tried to create a singleton a different way.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-13

Insanitize Your Inputs

by in CodeSOD on

Honestly, I don't know what to say about this code sent to us by Austin, beyond "I think somebody was very confused".

string text;
text = "";
// snip
box.Text = text;
text = "";
text = XMLUtil.SanitizeXmlString(text);
20 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-09

Unnavigable

by in CodeSOD on

Do you know what I had forgotten until this morning? That VBScript (and thus, older versions of Visual Basic) don't require you to use parentheses when calling a function. Foo 5 and Foo(5) are the same thing.

Of course, why would I remember that? I thankfully haven't touched any of those languages since about… 2012. Which is actually a horrifyingly short time ago, back when I supported classic ASP web apps. Even when I did, I always used parentheses because I wanted my code to be something close to readable.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-09

Mais Que Nada

by in Error'd on

I never did explain the elusive off-by-one I hinted at, did I? A little meta, perhaps. It is our practice at Error'd to supply five nuggets of joy each week. But in episode previous-plus-one, you actually got six! (Or maybe, depending on how you count them, that's yet another off-by-one. I slay me.) If that doesn't tickle you enough, just wait until you hear what Dave L. brought us. Meanwhile...

"YATZP" scoffed self-styled Foo AKA F. Yet Another Time Zone P*, I guess. Not wrong. According to Herr Aka F., "German TV teletext (yes, we still have it!) botched the DST start (upper right corner). The editors realized it and posted a message stating as much, sent from the 'future' (i.e. correct) time zone."

15 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-07

Get Explosive

by in Representative Line on

Sean sends us a one-line function that is a delight, if by delight you mean "horror". You'll be shocked to know it's PHP.

function proget(){foreach($_GET as $k=>$v){if($k=="h"){$GLOBALS["h"]=1;}$p=explode(",",$k);}return($p);} //function to process GET headers
15 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-08

Join Us in this Query

by in CodeSOD on

Today's anonymous submitter worked for a "large, US-based, e-commerce company." This particular company was, some time back, looking to save money, and like so many companies do, that meant hiring offshore contractors.

Now, I want to stress, there's certainly nothing magical about national borders which turns software engineers into incompetents. The reality is simply that contractors never have their client's best interests at heart; they only want to be good enough to complete their contract. This gets multiplied by the contracting firm's desire to maximize their profits by keeping their contractors as booked as possible. And it gets further multiplied by the remoteness and siloing of the interaction, especially across timezones. Often, the customer sends out requirements, and three months later gets a finished feature, with no more contact than that- and it never goes well.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-04

A Ruby Encrusted Footgun

by in CodeSOD on

Many years ago, JP joined a Ruby project. This was in the heyday of Ruby, when every startup on Earth was using it, and if you weren't building your app on Rails, were you even building an app?

Now, Ruby offers a lot of flexibility. One might argue that it offers too much flexibility, especially insofar as it permits "monkey patching": you can always add new methods to an existing class, if you want. Regardless of the technical details, JP and the team saw that massive flexibility and said, "Yes, we should use that. All of it!"

6 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-01
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