The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Containerization

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-09-27

A large company with facilities all over the Asia-Pacific region opted to modernize. They'd just finished a pile of internal development that extended the functionality of a 3rd party package, and they wanted to containerize the whole shebang.

That's where Fred came in, about 9 months into a 12 month effort. Things hadn't gone well, but a lot of the struggles were growing pains. Many of the containers were built as gigantic monoliths. A lot of the settings you might need to do a Kubernetes deployment weren't properly configured. It was a mess, but it wasn't a WTF, just a lot of work.

15 comments - Last comment @ 19:27

A Valid Call

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-09-26

"Never trust your inputs" is a generally good piece of advice for software development. We can, however, get carried away.

Janice inherited a system which, among many other things, stores phone numbers. Like most such systems, the database validates phone numbers, and guarantees that numbers are stored in a canonical format, as text.

16 comments - Last comment @ 19:36

Model Years

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2022-09-22

Caleb (previously) continues to work for a vehicle finance company. Most recnetly, he was working on a data ingestion application. Its job was to pull in a big ol' pile of CSVs from a mix of vendors and customers and feed it into a central database to keep things up to date.

"Application", however, is misleading. In reality, it was a suite of Access databases scattered around various network shares. Each represented a custom data loading pathway for a kind of data. It wasn't true that each was isolated from every other- frequently, the data flow would be "Open database \\fileserver\processing\vendor01.mdb, use the form to load the CSV file, then open \\fileserver\processing\process01.mdb, but only AFTER you've deleted the CSV file."

17 comments - Last comment @ 2022-09-24

The Base Model

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-09-21

Penny uses a Python ORM. Like most ORMs, it involves a lot of "inherit from a BaseModel class, and get all your database access stuff for "free". Or at least, it used to. They've released an update.

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        if hasattr(self, "ACCESS_POLICY_VIEWSET_NAME"):
            deprecation_logger.warn(
                f"The model {self.__class__} defines the 'ACCESS_POLICY_VIEWSET_NAME' class "
                f"attribute which is no longer required and is discouraged to be set."
            )
        return super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)

13 comments - Last comment @ 2022-09-22

TODO: Post an Article

by Remy Porter in Editor's Soapbox on 2022-09-20

Yesterday, I briefly mentioned the "TODO" comment as part of the WTF. Anyone who develops software for long enough is going to develop some pet peeves. Lord knows, my feelings on Hungarian Notation are well established. Or ternaries, though honestly, for ternaries, I mostly am in it for the puns.

But, I've got another pet peeve that's crawling up my butt far enough that I felt the need to do a soapbox about it.

36 comments - Last comment @ 09:27

Bitmaps and Streams

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-09-19

Robert has inherited a .NET application. It's a big-ball-of-mud, full of monstrous classes of thousands of lines and no coherent purpose, complete with twenty constructors.

It's ugly and messy, but it's mostly just generically bad. This method, however, is a lot of bad choices in very few lines.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2022-09-26

Version Numbers

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2022-09-15

Initech was the big customer for Chops's company. And like a lot of big customers, they had requests and they had the weight to throw around to get their requests fulfilled. When they wanted a new feature, they got a new feature. When they found a bug, they got the patch ASAP.

No matter how special Initech thought they were, they were mostly requesting things that other customers wanted anyway, so it worked pretty well.

43 comments - Last comment @ 2022-09-26

Walking is your Duty

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-09-14

Embedded chip documentation is sometimes very bad, and very confusing. Frequently it's difficult to really understand the ins and outs of a given chip without simply getting experience.

Which is why Mr. Scrith was a bit surprised with this code, which came from someone who definitely should have known better.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2022-09-25