Remy Porter

Remy is a veteran developer who writes software for space probes.

He's often on stage, doing improv comedy, but insists that he isn't doing comedy- it's deadly serious. You're laughing at him, not with him. That, by the way, is usually true- you're laughing at him, not with him.

Just a Few Updates

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Misha has a co-worker who has unusual ideas about how database performance works. This co-worker, Ted, has a vague understanding that a SQL query optimizer will attempt to find the best execution path for a given query. Unfortunately, Ted has just enough knowledge to be dangerous; he believes that the job of a developer is to write SQL queries that will "trick" the optimizer into doing an even better job, somehow.

This means that Ted loves subqueries.


National Exclamations

by in Representative Line on

Carlos and Claire found themselves supporting a 3rd party logistics package, called IniFreight. Like most "enterprise" software, it was expensive, unreliable, and incredibly complicated. It had also been owned by four different companies during the time Carlos had supported it, as its various owners underwent a series of acquisitions. It kept them busy, which is better than being bored.

One day, Claire asked Carlos, "In SQL, what does an exclamation point mean?"


Born Single

by in CodeSOD on

Alistair sends us a pretty big blob of code, but it's a blob which touches upon everyone's favorite design pattern: the singleton. It's a lot of Java code, so we're going to take this as chunks. Let's start with the two methods responsible for constructing the object.

The purpose of this code is to parse an XML file, and construct a mapping from a "name" field in the XML to a "batch descriptor".


Back Up for a Moment

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James's team has a pretty complicated deployment process implemented as a series of bash scripts. The deployment is complicated, the scripts doing the deployment are complicated, and failures mid-deployment are common. That means they need to gracefully roll back, and they way they do that is by making backup copies of the modified files.

This is how they do that.


The XML Dating Service

by in CodeSOD on

One of the endless struggles in writing reusable API endpoints is creating useful schemas to describe them. Each new serialization format comes up with new ways to express your constraints, each with their own quirks and footguns and absolute trainwrecks.

Maarten has the "pleasure" of consuming an XML-based API, provided by a third party. It comes with an XML schema, for validation. Now, the XML Schema Language has a large number of validators built in. For example, if you want to restrict a field to being a date, you can mark it's type as xsd:date. This will enforce a YYYY-MM-DD format on the data.


Off Color

by in CodeSOD on

Carolyn inherited a somewhat old project that had been initiated by a "rockstar" developer, and then passed to developer after developer over the years. They burned through rockstars faster than Spinal Tap goes through drummers. The result is gems like this:

private void init(){
	ResourceHelper rh = new ResourceHelper();
	for ( int i = 0; i < 12; i++) {
		months[i] = rh.getResource("calendar."+monthkeys[i]+".long");
		months_s[i] = rh.getResource("calendar."+monthkeys[i]+".short");
	}
	StaticData data = SomeService.current().getStaticData();
	this.bankHolidayList = data.getBankHolidayList();
	colors.put("#dddddd", "#dddddd");
	colors.put("#cccccc", "#cccccc");
	colors.put("#e6e6e6", "#e6e6e6");
	colors.put("#ff0000", "#ffcccc");
	colors.put("#ffff00", "#ffffcc");
	colors.put("#00ff00", "#ccffcc");
	colors.put("#5050ff", "#ccccff");
	colors.put("#aa0000", "#ff9999");
	colors.put("#ff8000", "#ffcc99");
	colors.put("#99ff99", "#ccffcc");
	colors.put("#ffcc99", "#ffffcc");
	colors.put("#ff9966", "#ffcc99");
	colors.put("#00c040", "#99cc99");
	colors.put("#aadddd", "#ccffff");
	colors.put("#e0e040", "#ffff99");
	colors.put("#6699ff", "#99ccff");
}

All Locked Up

by in CodeSOD on

Dan was using a third-party database which provided a PHP API. At one point, Dan was running into an issue where he actually needed locks on the database. Fortunately for him, the vendor documentation told him that there was a method called obtainRowLock.

obtainRowLock($table, $where) - Attempt to lock a row, will escalate and lock the table if row locking is not supported, will escalate and lock the database if table locking is not supported; returns true on success, false on failure
$table - name of table to lock
$where - WHERE clause to define rows, ex: "WHERE id=52". If left empty, function will assume a table lock


The Last Last Name

by in CodeSOD on

Sometimes, you see some code which is perfectly harmless, but illustrates an incredibly dangerous person behind them. The code isn't good, but it isn't bad in any meaningful way, but it was written by a cocaine addled Pomeranian behind the controls of a bulldozer: it's full of energy, doesn't know exactly what's going on, and at some point, it's going to hit something important.

Such is the code which Román sends us.


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