What Quick Fixes Make You Queasy When You Code Them?

Question

We've all done them, the short fix that will get the system back up and running until we can Do The Right Thing.

What have you marked in your code with the dreaded //Hack comment?

Answer 1

Any kind of hard-coding.

Answer 2

Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V

Answer 3

When I make a minor change and it works, but I'm not really sure why.

Answer 4

Throwing DLLs into the same directory as the executable so that they can be found.

Answer 5

Changing the timezone instead of fixing the timestamp problems.

Answer 6

Commenting out the line that is causing a segfault.

Answer 7

replacing a faulty peice of code with an if / else

Answer 8

Coding something without proper exception and argument handling.

• i.e. Not checking for null or empty variables.
• Opening a connection (which could fail) and then running methods on that.
• Selecting from a list of elements (which may not return anything) and doing logic on the first element (which may not be there since the list could be empty).

Answer 9

When using a truly Object Oriented language, typically anything that requires an if statement, or especially a switch. It's usually a sign that you're not doing OO correctly.

Answer 10

Writing my own function rather than taking the time to figure out how to use somebody else's pre-existing, tested, and proven function.

Writing code is easier than reading it.

Answer 11

Table based HTML design when x-browser issues made me realise my CSS skills need more work

Answer 12

Using the windows registry as a communications channel between different parts of the same software system, because it's so much easier than doing it correctly.

Answer 13

My fellow workers have this ritual ( not exactly but some sort of )

Copy resource files all over the computer for the program to find them.

Shutdown the app.

Shutdown the IDE

Shutdown the messenger ( just in case )

Shutdown all the applications ( to make it sure )

Shutdown the whole computer ( not restarting it but actually shut down and leave it for exactly 2 minutes )

Jump three times on one foot.

Turn the lucky cup up side down 1 time

and walk around the block clockwise ( otherwise It won't work ) .... .

Ahh and give a little pray.

When they do this, it makes me so angry. I tell them there is not such a thing like Voodoo programming.

But.. when I'm all alone, at 3 a.m. on a holiday ( like .. Independence Day or some other ) I ask myself... what if I do the ritual....

Answer 14

This just never works..

public static void sanityCheck () throws ScaryException {
  // TODO
}

also, putting in all initialization values at the beginning of the program, with a "this will go into a config file" comment. Should just put it in the config file.. it'll take 5 minutes! And yet, I start off this way every time.

Answer 15

Any bug fix that's committed without a non-regression test...

Answer 16

"Find/Replace All."

Even scarier when it works.

Answer 17

Code that is dependent on the date because of changes in other systems. Code like, "after 2008-10-xx, remove this check".

Answer 18

Adding null checks where null should not be possible, but not figuring out how a null ended up there. (But I never leave the code like that!)

Answer 19

If nothing explodes when I build after an hour of code-editing, I get suspicious.

Answer 20

I have a friend who is a SQL ninja who will occasionally give me some slick solution. I can follow what's being done but I know that if it needs to be tweaked, I will be ill-prepared to do so. This doesn't prevent me from using the SQL but it does fill me with queasiness.

Answer 21

After a while of debugging a lot of errors, I'll run tests to see how many errors are left. If it goes from being a lot of errors pre-debugging to zero errors after, I feel great for a millisecond, then I wonder sickly if I broke the tests themselves.