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Sometimes, it's hard to know just when you are. This morning, I woke up to a Macbook that thinks it's in Paris, four hours ago. Pining for pain chocolate. A bevy of anonyms have had similar difficulties.
First up, an unarabian anonym observes "They say that visiting Oman feels like traveling back in time to before the rapid modernization of the Arab states. I just think their eVisa application system is taking this "time travel" thing a bit too far... "
Someone wanted to make sure that invalid routes logged an error in their Go web application. Artem found this when looking at production code.
Oct 25if (requestUriPath != "/config:system") &&
(requestUriPath != "/config:system/ntp") &&
(requestUriPath != "/config:system/ntp/servers") &&
(requestUriPath != "/config:system/ntp/servers/server") &&
(requestUriPath != "/config:system/ntp/servers/server/config") &&
(requestUriPath != "/config:system/ntp/servers/server/config/address") &&
(requestUriPath != "/config:system/ntp/servers/server/config/key-id") &&
(requestUriPath != "/config:system/ntp/servers/server/config/minpoll") &&
(requestUriPath != "/config:system/ntp/servers/server/config/maxpoll") &&
(requestUriPath != "/config:system/ntp/servers/server/config/version") &&
(requestUriPath != "/config:system/ntp/servers/server/state") &&
(requestUriPath != "/config:system/ntp/servers/server/state/address") &&
(requestUriPath != "/config:system/ntp/servers/server/state/key-id") &&
(requestUriPath != "/config:system/ntp/servers/server/state/minpoll") &&
(requestUriPath != "/config:system/ntp/servers/server/state/maxpoll") &&
(requestUriPath != "/config:system/ntp/servers/server/state/version") {
log.Info("ProcessGetNtpServer: no return of ntp server state for ", requestUriPath)
return nil
}
Today's representative line comes from Capybara James (most recently previously). It's representative, not just of the code base, but of Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Or, "you get what you measure".
If, for example, you decide that code coverage metrics are how you're going to judge developers, then your developers are going to ensure that the code coverage looks great. If you measure code coverage, then you will get code coverage- and nothing else.
One of the things that makes legacy code legacy is that code, over time, rots. Some of that rot comes from the gradual accumulation of fixes, hacks, and kruft. But much of the rot also comes from the tooling going unsupported or entirely out of support.
For example, many years ago, I worked in a Visual Basic 6 shop. The VB6 IDE went out of support in April, 2008, but we continued to use it well into the next decade. This made it challenging to support the existing software, as the IDE frequently broke in response to OS updates. Even when we started running it inside of a VM running an antique version of Windows 2000, we kept running into endless issues getting projects to compile and build.
Robert R picked up a bug in his company's event scheduling app. Sometimes, events were getting reported a day off from when they actually were.
It didn't take too long to find the culprit, and as is so often the case, the culprit was handling dates with strings.
... when I'm eight thousand and three? Doesn't quite scan.
Old soul jeffphi hummed "It's comforting to know that I'll have health insurance coverage through my 8,030th birthday!"
Wolferitza sends us a large chunk of a C# class. We'll take it in chunks because there's a lot here, but let's start with the obvious problem:
private int iID0;
private int iID1;
private int iID2;
private int iID3;
private int iID4;
private int iID5;
private int iID6;
private int iID7;
private int iID8;
private int iID9;
private int iID10;
private int iID11;
private int iID12;
private int iID13;
Handling non-existent values always presents special challenges. We've (mostly) agreed that NULL is, in some fashion, the right way to do it, though it's still common to see some sort of sentinel value that exists outside of the expected range- like a function returning a negative value when an error occurred, and a zero (or positive) value when the operation completes.
Javier found this function, which has a… very French(?) way of handling invalid dates.
Alicia recently moved to a new country and took a job with a small company willing to pay well and help with relocation costs. Overall, the code base was pretty solid. Despite the overall strong code base, one recurring complaint was that running the test suite was painfully long.
While Alicia doesn't specify what the core business is, but says: "in this company's core business, random numbers were the base of everything."
Brian (previously)found himself contracting for an IoT company, shipping thermostats and other home automation tools, along with mobile apps to control them.
Brian was hired because the previous contractor had hung around long enough for the product to launch, cashed the check, and vanished, never to be heard from again.
As I was traveling this week (just home today), conveyances of all sorts were on my mind.
Llarry A. warned "This intersection is right near my house. Looks like it's going to be inconvenient for a while..." Keeping this in mind, I chose to take the train rather than drive.
Our submitter, Gearhead, was embarking on STEM-related research. This required him to pursue funding from a governmental agency that we’ll call the Ministry of Silly Walks. In order to start a grant application and track its status, Gearhead had to create an account on the Ministry website.
The registration page asked for a lot of personal information first. Then Gearhead had to create his own username and password. He used his password generator to create a random string: D\h.|wAi=&:;^t9ZyoO
Dotan was digging through vendor supplied documentation to understand how to use an API. To his delight, he found a specific function which solved exactly the problem he had, complete with examples of how it was to be used. Fantastic!
He copied one of the examples, and hit compile, and reviewed the list of errors. Mostly, the errors were around "the function you're calling doesn't exist". He went back to the documentation, checked it, went back to the code, didn't find any mistakes, and scratched his head.
Years ago, Brian had a problem: their C# application would crash sometimes. What was difficult to understand was why it was crashing, because it wouldn't crash in response to a user action, or really, any easily observable action.
The basic flow was that the users used a desktop application. Many operations that the users wanted to perform were time consuming, so the application spun up background tasks to do them, thus allowing the user to do other things within the application. And sometimes, the application would just crash, both when the user hadn't done anything, and when all background jobs should have been completed.
The first time Z hit the captcha on his company's site, he didn't think much of it. And to be honest, the second time he wasn't paying that much attention. So it wasn't until the third time that he realized that the captcha had showed him the same image every single time- a "5" with lines scribbled all over it.
That led Z to dig out the source and see how the captcha was implemneted.