This one is more of a diary blog, rather than criticising anyone in particular. It’s an example of the tricky and infuriating side of being a software developer.

There was a bug logged a few months back that we didn’t pay attention to, but it’s progressively got more complaints and there are a bunch of users complaining about it on a Facebook group, so I think it got attention from the CEO.

Like usual, the bug comes to me to fix, and it seemed the expectation was that I’d have it done in a few days.

Users basically have an Inbox with a list of tasks in there. Like an email application they can see the tasks on the main-view but can also double-click to open them. On this open-view, they can click buttons to deal with the task, but they can also scroll to new tasks rather than closing.

On the open-view, users were clicking Approve but nothing happened. If they clicked it again, then it was successfully approved. If you looked in the audit, it did show two approvals. This bug didn’t occur if you opened the task directly from the main-view, then Approved. It was only when you switched to another task on the open-view.

I could easily recreate it, but when I was debugging, I couldn’t make sense of what was going on. It seemed to have the correct data, it updated the correct property, then all of a sudden, it seemed wrong again. The code in that area was massively confusing and it was hard to work out how things should work.

After days of looking at it, I managed to persuade one of my work friends (and maybe one of the smartest developers) to come help me out. He couldn’t understand the problem, but came up with theories of caching problems. I didn’t see anything obvious in the code I saw, but I was out of ideas, so we changed the config to disable all the caches. Didn’t make a difference.

The next day, I told my manager that there’s no progress, and we probably need to get more nerds involved. So I managed to get a couple of hours with the smartest developer at the company.

He couldn’t understand it either. He was convinced that after the data is saved to the database, something on another Thread was changing the data in the cache, so that the object on the client doesn’t match the server cache. 

The next day, we were losing hope. I could only get a couple of hours with the smartest developers but even they were confused, and now I was on my own again.

I looked at some recent changes to the files in question, and I saw someone had reduced the amount of “refreshes” on these tasks. It was previously trying to reload the data a few times every time you selected a task. I reverted the changes to see if it made a difference…and it fixed the issue.

The thing is, I wasn’t going to just revert the changes, because the performance issues would be back. So then I was trying to work out why that had a bearing on the cache. I persuaded a Senior developer on my team to also look at it because I was convinced I was close, but by this point, it was hard to think because I had spent 5 days on this same bug. I had been doing more than my 9-5, I was basically doing 8-6, then sometimes 10pm-12am. There must be something I am overlooking.

It took him a couple of days but he did point me in the right direction. It seemed we were basically caching a data object in a variable, retrieving the data again on the server which changed the object references in the server cache. Then when you click Approve, it updates a different object reference, and now they are out of sync.

So I basically removed the cached variable, and only used the data once the server cache had been updated.

A simple fix in the end, but it took all week.

Many years ago, the development team was set-up in a way that “proper” developers worked on enhancements, whereas Juniors worked on fixing bugs. To be honest, in many situations, fixing bugs is the hardest scenario.

I always like a variety, because doing a particular thing becomes tedious and isn’t giving you a good range of skills.

Julian started moaning about how he wanted to “do some enhancements”. He was itching to prove himself and craved variety.

The managers finally caved in and gave him a set of 4 enhancements to do as a mini-project over the course of a couple of months. When the deadline approached, he had left the company.

When we looked at his changes, only 2 looked even close to finished. They were riddled with bugs. One of them looked like an absolute botched implementation, and when I looked at the code and pasted it into Google, I found the Stack Overflow posts it was taken from.

Julian had just copied and pasted code, tried to change a few things here and there, but couldn’t improve it. I imagine he realised he has made a fool out of himself, so handed in his notice before we uncovered what a mess it was.

In the end, we just scrapped his code completely because it was a waste of time looking at it any further. 

I was peeking at Code Reviews and I saw this code.

retrievalUser.Surname = Formatters.ToTitleCase(usersName.Item as string);
retrievalUser.GivenName = Formatters.ToTitleCase(usersName.Item as string);

Notice how the code for both Surname and GivenName is exactly the same.

How can that possibly work? If “usersName.Item” is the full name like Alan Taylor, then surely if the UI shows GivenName and Surname, then it will be displayed as “Alan Taylor Alan Taylor” which is obviously not their name.

If this is some temporary code, then why haven’t they added a code comment next to the code to highlight that this needs replacing? Something like “Currently, the API only returns the full name so we cannot determine the users Surname and GivenName until version 2.1”.

Also, is it even correct to Title Case someone’s name? If you have a name like McDonald, wouldn’t this become Mcdonald? There’s probably loads of other examples too. I think the Dutch “van” is lowercase like “Robin van Persie”.

So there’s not much right with these 2 lines of code.

I had a look at my old team’s work to see what progress they have made and to reassure myself I had made the correct decision to leave that project. 

Not much has changed in months. All the issues we had haven’t been fixed. There’s errors logged to the console window, there’s loads of buttons that don’t work. There’s a few small features but nothing works properly. 

What made me laugh was a button that said “Press F5 to launch”. It’s a website. Pressing F5 isn’t going to launch a dialog; it’s going to refresh the page in the browser.

Maybe there is a way of overriding the browser’s refresh behaviour but that would be very annoying to the user.

What I don’t get is: how someone came up with that requirement in the first place, someone else implemented it and somehow didn’t realise it wasn’t going to work. Although surely they did realise when they wrote some code to do it, then pressed F5 and the page refreshes…but then checked it in anyway.

Honestly, you just can’t get the staff.

A developer wrote some code that tries to extract text that looks like HTML tags. So if you have <h1>, <div> etc in your text, he was basically just deleting the HTML prior to saving it to the database. 

The thing is, the code just looked for a “<” then a “>” and removed everything between. So if you had a sentence like “the value is ❤ and >1”, then run that through his code, the returned value would be “the value is 1” which has a completely different meaning. You could have paragraphs of text between these characters, and his code would just delete it.

Not sure why he decided to hand-craft his own solution. There will be more official ways of encoding HTML.