Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

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TooMuchAbstraction: Oct 14, 2012; I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.; Fun Shoe

It wouldn't surprise me if some poor bastard accidentally emailed out real clients while doing some testing. :allears:

# ? Jul 10, 2018 16:34

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# ? Jun 7, 2024 22:05

Janitor Prime: Jan 22, 2004; PC LOAD LETTER

What da fuck does that mean; Fun Shoe

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

It wouldn't surprise me if some poor bastard accidentally emailed out real clients while doing some testing.

That's loving terrible, Amazon has proper separation of dev/qa/pre-prod/prod on every team I ever worked with. If that wasn't enough you could still conditionally enable and disable features for particular groups of users (you can narrow it down to a single user) in production with a service called weblab. Basically you can wrap any code block with the equivalent of an IFDEF based on the weblab and only those users go down that code path. It's an awesome tool and is meant to prevent poo poo like this from happening.

# ? Jul 10, 2018 23:53

The Fool: Oct 16, 2003

https://github.com/etsy/feature

Etsy has a similar thing to allow them to do feature testing in production. It's sounds super cool, but I've never had occasion to use it.

# ? Jul 11, 2018 00:00

necrotic: Aug 2, 2005; I owe my brother big time for this!

Feature flags are not a new or unique concept.

# ? Jul 11, 2018 00:07

New Yorp New Yorp: Jul 18, 2003; Only in Kenya.; Pillbug

Feature toggles are a huge part of being able to do continuous delivery. Feature not done? Turn it off.

# ? Jul 11, 2018 01:05

SardonicTyrant: Feb 26, 2016; BTICH IM A NEWT
熱くなれ夢みた明日を
必ずいつかつかまえる
走り出せ振り向くことなく
&

Returning to the Test Suite of Doom, I'm discovering that the only time a test will fail is if it trips the custom assert statements. Thrown exceptions won't cause a test to fail as long as it doesn't affect an assert.

Also, we're using Selenium, and the product is written with Dojo widgets, so that's...an experience.

# ? Jul 11, 2018 03:08

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

If you are Venmo friends with a Venmo developer you will regularly see them make transfers to other Venmo devs with notes like "trying something" and "hope this works" because they don't have a test network for that stuff.

# ? Jul 12, 2018 01:42

KernelSlanders: May 27, 2013; Rogue operating systems on occasion spread lies and rumors about me.

I've got a test suite at work that calls production, third-party services. Don't have the Facebook API key in your environment? Your tests are going to fail. Not on the VPN? Your tests are going to fail.

# ? Jul 12, 2018 04:13

Hammerite: Mar 9, 2007; And you don't remember what I said here, either, but it was pompous and stupid.; Jade Ear Joe

raminasi posted:

If you are Venmo friends with a Venmo developer you will regularly see them make transfers to other Venmo devs with notes like "trying something" and "hope this works" because they don't have a test network for that stuff.

I didn't know what Venmo was, assumed it was some bullshit social network or something so I googled them and they're a business dealing with money apparently? You're dealing with people's money and you don't have a test environment, what the gently caress

# ? Jul 12, 2018 10:22

NihilCredo: Jun 6, 2011; iram omni possibili modo preme:
plus una illa te diffamabit, quam multæ virtutes commendabunt

KernelSlanders posted:

I've got a test suite at work that calls production, third-party services. Don't have the Facebook API key in your environment? Your tests are going to fail. Not on the VPN? Your tests are going to fail.

That's a good thing though? Just put them in a group called "integration tests" so you can skip them when you're not in a suitable environment.

# ? Jul 12, 2018 12:42

streetlamp: May 7, 2007; Danny likes his party hat
He does not like his banana hat

i am protected :c00lbert:

# ? Jul 12, 2018 14:53

Polio Vax Scene: Apr 5, 2009

# ? Jul 12, 2018 15:23

Eggnogium: Jun 1, 2010; Never give an inch! Hnnnghhhhhh!

I have a friend who used to work at a popular travel booking website. Apparently to test credit card processing code they sometimes had to charge their own personal credit cards and then get a refund issued.

# ? Jul 12, 2018 16:53

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

streetlamp posted:

i am protected

im the --quiet and --verbose flags in the same command

# ? Jul 12, 2018 17:27

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Hammerite posted:

I didn't know what Venmo was, assumed it was some bullshit social network or something so I googled them and they're a business dealing with money apparently? You're dealing with people's money and you don't have a test environment, what the gently caress

Oh, but it is a bullshit social network. Their original gimmick was "wouldn't it be cool if all your payments to friends were publicly shown to all your other friends?".

# ? Jul 12, 2018 18:43

ulmont: Sep 15, 2010; IF I EVER MISS VOTING IN AN ELECTION (EVEN AMERICAN IDOL) ,OR HAVE UNPAID PARKING TICKETS, PLEASE TAKE AWAY MY FRANCHISE

Plorkyeran posted:

Oh, but it is a bullshit social network. Their original gimmick was "wouldn't it be cool if all your payments to friends were publicly shown to all your other friends?".

That was really part of the pitch?

# ? Jul 12, 2018 18:51

streetlamp: May 7, 2007; Danny likes his party hat
He does not like his banana hat

still better than bitcoin

# ? Jul 12, 2018 18:53

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Hardcoded holiday pauses :shepicide:

# ? Jul 12, 2018 20:04

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Eggnogium posted:

I have a friend who used to work at a popular travel booking website. Apparently to test credit card processing code they sometimes had to charge their own personal credit cards and then get a refund issued.

Same, when I used to work in e-commerce recommendation services. Had to place a few dozen orders on client sites, with comments reading "TEST ONLY PLEASE DO NOT CHARGE", plus a couple legit ones for rye whiskey and Xmas ornaments.

# ? Jul 12, 2018 20:55

redleader: Aug 18, 2005; Engage according to operational parameters

streetlamp posted:

i am protected

#To the NSA: YOU loving LOSE.

# ? Jul 12, 2018 21:45

fishmech: Jul 16, 2006; by VideoGames; Salad Prong

Hammerite posted:

I didn't know what Venmo was, assumed it was some bullshit social network or something so I googled them and they're a business dealing with money apparently? You're dealing with people's money and you don't have a test environment, what the gently caress

Venmo is a division of Braintree payments, which is itself a division of PayPal, since a series of purchases a few years back.

At this point the years of PayPal ownership have morphed it into being more of just a different interface to PayPal's payment systems (including PayPal making it available as a way to pay at physical stores that already accepted PayPal, like Home Depot) than its original functioning as a completely separate payment network. PayPal itself definitely has separate test and production networks, but who can say for the specific Venmo layer, which is slowly becoming deprecated.

# ? Jul 13, 2018 02:03

Khorne: May 1, 2002

Did you guys know you can solve the dining philosophers problem by just delaying the start of the dining?

Philosopher one dines with no start delay, his adjacent philosophers dine with some small initial delay, and the last two guys dine with a larger initial delay than the previous two.

:suicide:

# ? Jul 14, 2018 05:13

Xerophyte: Mar 17, 2008; This space intentionally left blank

https://make.girls.moe

_{^{From this abomination of science, apparently.}}

# ? Jul 14, 2018 06:34

Carbon dioxide: Oct 9, 2012

https://www.pcgamer.com/amp/all-this-time-aliens-colonial-marines-stupid-ai-may-have-been-caused-by-a-single-typo/?__twitter_impression=true

# ? Jul 14, 2018 11:08

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Xerophyte posted:

https://make.girls.moe

_{^{From this abomination of science, apparently.}}

quote:

We are releasing a new project � Crypko, in which you can get and trade AI generated anime characters on Ethereum blockchain. Click here to play Crypko Beta on Testnet for free.

# ? Jul 14, 2018 16:43

Coffee Mugshot: Jun 26, 2010; by Lowtax

Xerophyte posted:

_{^{From this abomination of science, apparently.}}

quote:

We all love anime characters and are tempted to create our custom ones. However, it takes tremendous
efforts to master the skill of drawing, after which we are first capable of designing our own characters.
To bridge this gap, the automatic generation of anime characters offers an opportunity to bring a
custom character into existence without professional skill.

ushering a new age of prosperity imo

# ? Jul 14, 2018 17:42

Doc Hawkins: Jun 15, 2010; Dashing? But I'm not even moving!

They look like just a fixed set of manually-drawn faces with unique wobble-smudge patterns.

# ? Jul 14, 2018 17:48

SardonicTyrant: Feb 26, 2016; BTICH IM A NEWT
熱くなれ夢みた明日を
必ずいつかつかまえる
走り出せ振り向くことなく
&

Call me when they develop an algorithm to Jojo any picture.

# ? Jul 14, 2018 18:35

DONT THREAD ON ME: Oct 1, 2002; by Nyc_Tattoo; Floss Finder

cant wait for the inevitable conclusion of this research

# ? Jul 14, 2018 20:19

Gazpacho: Jun 18, 2004; by Fluffdaddy; Slippery Tilde

Carbon dioxide posted:

https://www.pcgamer.com/amp/all-this-time-aliens-colonial-marines-stupid-ai-may-have-been-caused-by-a-single-typo/?__twitter_impression=true

pro-click. Some coder in a hurry misspelled Tether as "Teather" in Aliens: Colonial Marines and hosed the AI in the finished product. Always remember this in code reviews.

A more general rule of thumb that isn't obvious to a lot of people: You are the first reviewer of your code. Don't dump the diff on someone else if you aren't willing to look at it yourself.

Gazpacho fucked around with this message at 03:21 on Jul 16, 2018

# ? Jul 16, 2018 03:15

rarbatrol: Apr 17, 2011; Hurt//maim//kill.

My guess is that it was spelled "teather" in the code base fairly late in the game's development until somebody realized and renamed it... and their IDE didn't detect this in the .ini file and so it stopped working.

# ? Jul 16, 2018 03:34

comedyblissoption: Mar 15, 2006

Shouldn't this be more of a lesson that type checking is important and errors should spit out on sloppiness. I wouldn't really admonish people for a 1-letter typo, and I'm never gonna look for that in a code review.

# ? Jul 16, 2018 04:46

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

comedyblissoption posted:

Shouldn't this be more of a lesson that type checking is important and errors should spit out on sloppiness. I wouldn't really admonish people for a 1-letter typo, and I'm never gonna look for that in a code review.

or maybe don't fix typos in code/configuration files unless you know all the places where it's used. unfortunately typos are like a magnet for interference from the very kind of person you want to keep the gently caress away from your codebase the most, the well-meaning do-gooder who wants to contribute but doesn't actually know how to do anything useful.

# ? Jul 16, 2018 05:17

Gazpacho: Jun 18, 2004; by Fluffdaddy; Slippery Tilde

Checking the init file keys against a registry of valid keys would have helped, but that assumes that the developers are coding the init file reader and have time to overengineer it, rather than using one off the shelf and paying attention to the user-visible functionality of their game

Gazpacho fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Jul 16, 2018

# ? Jul 16, 2018 05:42

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

given that they're remapping Xeno to Pawn, my guess is that sometime in the last month of development, Xeno AI was cut and the designers told the QA people "yeah just ignore that the Xeno guys act like complete bumbling idiots because they're using the Pawn AI on stuff they weren't designed for" and if bugs were filed they were quickly KS'd.

it's pretty clear that throughout all of development, nobody gave any shits about Aliens: Colonial Marines

# ? Jul 16, 2018 05:55

comedyblissoption: Mar 15, 2006

Gazpacho posted:

Checking the init file keys against a registry of valid keys would have helped, but that assumes that the developers are coding the init file reader and have time to overengineer it, rather than using one off the shelf and paying attention to the user-visible functionality of their game

I'm more lamenting that standard industry practice is to just use config files w/ no sanity checking whatsoever and so there's generally no standard off-the-shelf stuff. The article talking about the Aliens issue even said civ VI had a big launch problem w/ their AI b/c of a typo or whatever.

# ? Jul 16, 2018 07:05

itskage: Aug 26, 2003

I started making my employees use the code spell checker extension in vs code and it's great. It checks anything over 3 letters and is smart enough to split camel, snake, and Pascal case. It catches a lot of general stuff in comments (a lot of them mine tbh) but I've also noticed it seems to be getting everyone to name things slightly better. I used to see PRs with stuff like image.alttext or user.fname but now they're like image.altText user.firstName. Since the spell checker doesn't like the first two. Minuscule and superfluous changes, of course, but more technically correct.

However the nice unexpected thing that has been really nice about it has been in poo poo like PHP where you have:

PHP code:

class SomeClass {
    $someProperty = '';

    public function someFunction(string $x) {
        $this->somePropperty = $x;
    }
}

Gets caught when writing the code and not later when you get a run time warning about setting a previously undefined property. VS Code and PHPCS/MD don't seem the recognize these. I opened some older repos that predate any unit testing and found a couple other bugs that made it to production due to this issue.

Also I'd say it would do the same for js, but // @tscheck is pretty good about detecting these.

Suspicious Dish posted:

given that they're remapping Xeno to Pawn, my guess is that sometime in the last month of development, Xeno AI was cut and the designers told the QA people "yeah just ignore that the Xeno guys act like complete bumbling idiots because they're using the Pawn AI on stuff they weren't designed for" and if bugs were filed they were quickly KS'd.

it's pretty clear that throughout all of development, nobody gave any shits about Aliens: Colonial Marines

My understanding is that it was being outsourced, sent back to GB when they were unhappy with the quality the 3rd party studio was doing, then GB did what they could even though it wasn't supposed to be done in house. It was terrible shape but they ran out of time and launched anyway. Which is still GB's fault.

https://kotaku.com/5986694/from-dream-to-disaster-the-story-of-aliens-colonial-marines

itskage fucked around with this message at 08:08 on Jul 16, 2018

# ? Jul 16, 2018 07:47

Munkeymon: Aug 14, 2003; Motherfucker's got an
armor-piercing crowbar! Rigoddamndicu𝜆ous.

Every time I tried to set anything on my Prime Day order to delayed shipping, my Kindle lost its discount :wtc:

Wonder how much extra money Amazon is making from that bug, and weather it's more than they'll spend on customer service time issuing refunds

# ? Jul 16, 2018 15:33

Thermopyle: Jul 1, 2003; ...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. �Bertrand Russell

Yeah i was reading that aliens thing and I kept wondering what kind of crap coding environment are they in that doesn't check and flag their spelling.

# ? Jul 16, 2018 15:48

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# ? Jun 7, 2024 22:05

TooMuchAbstraction: Oct 14, 2012; I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.; Fun Shoe

Gazpacho posted:

A more general rule of thumb that isn't obvious to a lot of people: You are the first reviewer of your code. Don't dump the diff on someone else if you aren't willing to look at it yourself.

Oh my god yes. I can't count the number of times I've reviewed code that had really obvious stuff left behind, like the dev's debug logging. IMO your workflow should be something like: write code/tests, run tests locally, export change to central repro, run tests on CI system (to make sure you didn't e.g. forget to include a new file), review change, tweak, rerun tests, submit pull request.

# ? Jul 16, 2018 16:19

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

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