4 Year Special: Derek

It’s been 4 years since I started writing this blog! how time flies.

The original inspiration for the blog was to tell stories about my incompetent colleague Derek. However, he left shortly after I started writing – so I didn’t end up writing many blogs about him.

After going through some old chat logs I found, I have dug up some extra stories, code snippets, and quotes.

“There’s a lot of duplication here, surprisingly. Functionally it is probably quite a big bag of spanners”

Derek

Hypocrite

When I first started working with Derek, I was telling my manager about the things he was doing and saying. My manager asked me how he is getting on to see if I had more stories to tell.

Matt:
How is Derek getting on?

Me 10:36:
on holiday, but he has spent a week or so sorting out some buttons. He has assigned two items to himself. 

So he complained that the User Stories were too big, so we have split them up a bit more. Yet he then assigns 2.

He hasn't sorted out all my comments I made on his last fix.

After Derek was making excuses that he wasn’t productive due to the size of our planned work, we split it into smaller chunks for his benefit. He then picks up multiple chunks in addition to also needing to rework his previous work. It seems we didn’t need to split the work up at all.

Redefining a boolean

bool hasSelectedReports = SelectedReports.Count != 1; 
bool noReportSelected = SelectedReports.Count == 0;

A boolean or “bool” for short represents true or false. Since there are two states, if you created a variable called “hasSelectedReports” you can invert it using the ! (not) operator, so saying !hasSelectedReports reads as “has no selected reports”. Derek decided to create a variable for the inverse, but then he got the logic wrong: If Count is 0, both hasSelectedReports and noReportSelected are true!

“I’m working from home today. Sorry I haven’t emailed sooner, I had some problems initially remoting in as my computer at work had a dicky fit.”

Derek

Pointless Conversion and check

return !String.IsNullOrEmpty(ConceptId.ToString()) ? ConceptId.ToString() : null;

ConceptId is defined as a long ,which is a number. It can represent any whole number between -9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807. It cannot be null/empty. By default it will be 0. Here, Derek converts the number to text (string) so he can take advantage of the IsNullOrEmpty method. If it is somehow null, we will return null… apart from if ConceptId was somehow null, calling ToString on it would crash.

If he really did want the text presentation of the number, this code should simply be

return ConceptId.ToString();

Pointless Conversion and check: part 2

if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(conceptId.ToString()))
{
   	_conceptIdInt64 = Convert.ToInt64(conceptId);
}

Again, Derek decides to convert the number to a string so he can check it isn’t null. It is always true, so then goes into the code block. He then converts the long to an Int64. A long IS an Int64. It’s just an alias for it. So the code is completely pointless, other than assigning a simple variable.

If at first you don’t succeed, try again

public Entity GetEntityFromConceptId(long conceptId)
{
  	return 
  	  	(EntityFinder.TryGetEntityFromId(conceptId)) != null 
  	  	? 
  	  	EntityFinder.TryGetEntityFromId(conceptId) 
  	  	: 
  	  	null;
}

When methods are named “Try”, it means that it might not be successful and can return “null”. In this case, TryGetEntityFromId returns null if you pass in a conceptId that doesn’t exist. So you should check for null, and do something different, maybe display an error message to the user. Although Derek decides to simply try again. Why would it work the second time?

(frustrated tone) I’ve spent 5 days on the same work item

Derek after 13 days trying to implement a simple feature. For the previous 3 days, during the daily stand-up meetings, he was saying he is “nearly finished and it’s pretty much ready to check in”

Conclusion

As you can tell from these stories, Derek made some bizarre choices and generally seemed deluded. There were times where I thought he had to be trolling, because there is no way you would write so much redundant code. I understand you can have bad days and have the occasional moments of madness, but it was a daily occurrence with Derek. For more stories about Derek, click the Derek tag.