The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Big Balls of…

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2018-04-24

The dependency graph of your application can provide a lot of insight into how objects call each other. In a well designed application, this is probably mostly acyclic and no one node on the graph has more than a handful of edges coming off of it. The kinds of applications we talk about here, on the other hand, we have a name for their graphs: the Enterprise Dependency and the Big Ball of Yarn.

Thomas K introduces us to an entirely new iteration: The Big Ball of Mandelbrot

15 comments - Last comment @ 10:05

The Truth About Comparisons

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2018-04-23

We often point to dates as one of the example data types which is so complicated that most developers can’t understand them. This is unfair, as pretty much every data type has weird quirks and edge cases which make for unexpected behaviors. Floating point rounding, integer overflows and underflows, various types of string representation…

But file-not-founds excepted, people have to understand Booleans, right?

33 comments - Last comment @ 05:44

Breaking Changes

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-04-17

We talk a lot about the sort of wheels one shouldn’t reinvent. Loads of bad code stumbles down that path. Today, Mary sends us some code from their home-grown unit testing framework.

Mary doesn’t have much to say about whatever case of Not Invented Here Syndrome brought things to this point. It’s especially notable that this is Python, which comes, out of the box, with a perfectly serviceable unittest module built in. Apparently not serviceable enough for their team, however, as Burt, the Lead Developer, wrote his own.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-18

All the Things!

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-04-16

Yasmin needed to fetch some data from a database for a report. Specifically, she needed to get all the order data. All of it. No matter how much there was.

The required query might be long running, but it wouldn’t be complicated. By policy, every query needed to be implemented as a stored procedure. Yasmin, being a smart prograammer, decided to check and see if anybody had already implemented a stored procedure which did what she needed. She found one called GetAllOrders. Perfect! She tested it in her report.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-19

A Comment on the Military Industrial Complex

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2018-04-11

Simon T tugged at his collar when the video played. It wasn’t much, just a video of their software being tested. It wasn’t the first time they’d tested Simon’s most recent patch, but it was going to be the last time. There were a lot of eyes in the conference room, and they were all turned on him.

Simon worked for the kind of company which made missiles. The test in the video was one of the highly expensive tests of a real missile under real-world conditions. Several of these had already been done with this software package, so Simon hadn’t expected any problems to crop up. In this case, though, the missile left its launcher and sailed in a perfect parabolic arc into the ground 5 meters away from the launch site.

57 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-20

Without Context

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-04-10

When writing up a Code SOD, a big part of the goal is to provide context for the bad code. Why is it bad, what would be better,, etc. In other words, we need to… ShowContext. Vasco O has exactly the method for that.

protected string ShowContext(string context)
{
    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(context))
    {
        return string.Format("{0}", context);
    }
    else
    {
        return string.Empty;
    }
}

33 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-11

Works for Us

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2018-04-05

Containers make deployment easy, or at least that’s what it says on the label. It makes intuitive sense, though- instead of wrangling all your dependencies on a host OS, and then trying to understand why your app can’t see them, you bundle all the dependencies into a container and push that around when you want to deploy. It Just Works™.

Sandra had just left a company which didn’t use containers, but containers wouldn’t have helped: the didn’t have a working deployment process, period. They didn’t even try deploying before the production push 9 months into the project, and the first twelve attempts consistently failed because someone hadn’t tested something, or someone didn’t update the script, or the requirements changed and were signed off but nobody told the development team. It meant a lot of nights, a lot of weekends, and a lot of meetings which devolved into circular firing squads.

Three gears which couldn't possibly turn

33 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-09

30 Days

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-04-04

Tim B did a little work with an e-learning vendor, with some very old code. The code in question happened to be so old that “this is server side JavaScript” was a horrifying novelty when they wrote it, instead of a standard deployment option via Node.

The code in question is bad date handling code, which isn’t impressive. What is impressive is that it demonstrates a terrible approach to dates which I’ve never seen before. It doubles as a terrible approach to arrays which I have seen before, but… it remains special.

50 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-10