Faithful MICHAEL R. is good for a chuckle today. "I am using the free tier Infura right now but think I will go enterprisey straight away." Can't turn down a deal like that, eh? > > > ...
ULVHAMNE sends us some bad code that, well, I think at this point we should really coin a name for this particular anti-pattern. @Override public int getNumOfItemsInDataContai...
BOB's employer had a data-driven application which wasn't performing terribly well. They had some in-house database administrators, but their skills were more "keep things running," and less "do ...
MARCUS's team was restructuring the API, and the architect thus wanted a number of methods marked obsolete, to encourage developers to move to the new version of the API. So the architect created...
As oft discussed, null-terminated C-style strings are an endless source of problems. But there's no problem so bad that it can't be made worse by a sufficiently motivated developer. Today's rat...
This week we have a special visit from a mythical beast: the snarklemma. But first, a non-error Error'd. Obsessive Optimizer IAN K. "Walmart's nationwide network of warehouse stores means they ...
Yesterday we talked about bad CSS. Today, we're going to talk about bad HTML. COREY inherited a web page that, among other things, wanted to display a bulleted list of links. Now, you or I mig...
There is a surprising amount of debate about how to use CSS classes. The correct side of this debate argues that we should use classes to describe what the content is, what role it serves in our ...
Once upon a time, I was tuning a database performance issue. The backing database was an Oracle database, and the key problem was simply that the data needed to be partitioned. Great, easy, I wro...
As oft stated, the specification governing email addresses is complicated, and isn't really well suited for regular expressions. You can get there , but honestly, most applications can get away w...
There are an infinite variety of ways to be wrong, but only very small number of ways to be right. Patient PETER W. discovers that MS Word is of two minds about English usage. "Microsoft Word j...
So many languages eschew "truth" for "truthiness". Today, we're looking at PHP's approach. PHP automatically coerces types to a boolean with some fairly simple rules: the boolean false is false...
Strings in C are a unique collection of mistakes. The biggest one is the idea of null termination. Null termination is not without its advantages: because you're using a single byte to mark the e...
GLORIA was a senior developer at IniMirage, a company that makes custom visualizations for their clients. Over a few years, IniMirage had grown to more than 100 people, but was still very much in...
It's incredibly common to convert objects to dictionaries/maps and back, for all sorts of reasons. JEFF's co-worker was tasked with taking a dictionary which contained three keys, "mail", "teleph...