coding-horrors

Code Review vs. Check In often?

Following Jeff's article about checking in often, some commenters couldn't resist spewing "Welcome to obvious land!" kind of comments. That's understandable, in most situation it's obvious that checking in as soon as something is finished before proceeding to the next feature is the way to go. But what about places with strongly enforce...

How to reverse engineer undocumented legacy application?

Once I was assigned to a project which was about adding couple new features to the existing Java based web application. Because it was a matter of just couple simple features there was no chance for rewrite. Unfortunately, the code base came from a client without any documentation and the code itself wasn't commented too well. The orig...

SVN and XCode woes

I've heard repeatedly that XCode's integration with SVN is lacking, but seeing as I have personally never used it, I cannot help but wonder why. Now I'm starting a new project, and once again SCM has come up. This time though, I think I want a better idea of what exactly XCode does and doesn't do right with SVN. So, have any horror sto...

Ref Abuse: Worth Cleaning Up?

I have inherited some code that uses the ref keyword extensively and unnecessarily. The original developer apparently feared objects would be cloned like primitive types if ref was not used, and did not bother to research the issue before writing 50k+ lines of code. This, combined with other bad coding practices, has created some situa...

Common design by obfuscation practices?

What are some common practices you have seen used in the design by obfuscation crowd? I find it interesting to be on projects that are not allowed to be rewritten while, that would be the faster and most efficient solution to the problem. ...

What's the best kludge you've ever seen in code?

They may not be pretty, but they work. Sometimes a best-practice has to take a back seat to 'good enough'. What is the best example of a kludge that you've ever seen passed off in code? ...

Code Complete 2ed, composition and delegation.

Hi there. After a couple of weeks reading on this forum I thought it was time for me to do my first post. I'm currently rereading Code Complete. I think it's 15 years since the last time, and I find that I still can't write code ;-) Anyway on page 138 in Code Complete you find this coding horror example. (I have removed some of the ...