When Steve's employer went hunting for a new customer relationship management system (CRM), they had some requirements. A lot of them were around the kind of vendor support they'd get. Their sales team weren't the most technical people, and the company wanted to push as much routine support off to the vendor as possible.

But they also needed a system that was extensible. Steve's company had many custom workflows they wanted to be able to execute, and automated marketing messages they wanted to construct, and so wanted a CRM that had an easy to use API.

"No worries," the vendor sales rep said, "we've had a RESTful API in our system for years. It's well tested and reliable. It's JSON based."

The purchasing department ground their way through the purchase order and eventually they started migrating to the new CRM system. And it fell to Steve to start learning the JSON-based, RESTful API.

"JSON"-based was a more accurate description.

For example, an API endpoint might have a schema like:

DeliveryId: int // the ID of the created delivery Errors: xml // Collection of errors encountered

This example schema is representative. Many "JSON" documents contained strings of XML inside of them.

Often, this is done when an existing XML-based API is "modernized", but in this case, the root cause is a little dumber than that. The system uses SQL Server as its back end, and XML is one of the native types. They just have a stored procedure build an XML object and then return it as an output parameter.

You'll be surprised to learn that the vendor's support team had a similar level of care: they officially did what you asked, but sometimes it felt like malicious compliance.

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A common class of bad code is the code which mixes server side code with client side code. This kind of thing:

<script> <?php if (someVal) { ?> var foo = <? echo someOtherVal ?>; <?php } else { ?> var foo = 5; <?php } ?> </script>

We've seen it, we hate it, and is there really anything new to say about it?

Well, today's anonymous submitter found an "interesting" take on the pattern.

<script> if(linkfromwhere_srfid=='vff') { <?php $vff = 1; ?> } </script>

Here, they have a client-side conditional, and based on that conditional, they attempt to set a variable on the server side. This does not work. This cannot work: the PHP code executes on the server, the client code executes on the client, and you need to be a lot more thoughtful about how they interact than this.

And yet, the developer responsible has done this all over the code base, pushed the non-working code out to production, and when it doesn't work, just adds bug tickets to the backlog to eventually figure out why- tickets that never get picked up, because there's always something with a higher priority out there.

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Faithful Peter G. took a trip. "So I wanted to top up my bus ticket online. After asking for credit card details, PINs, passwords, a blood sample, and the airspeed velocity of an unladen European swallow, they also sent a notification to my phone which I had to authorise with a fingerprint, and then verify that all the details were correct (because you can never be too careful when paying for a bus ticket). So yes, it's me, but the details definitely are not correct." Which part is wrong, the currency? Any idea what the exchange rate is between NZD and the euro right now?

 

An anonymous member kvetched "Apparently, I'm a genius, but The New York Times' Spelling Bee is definitely not."

 

Mickey D. Had an ad pop up for a new NAS to market.
Specs: Check
Storage: Check
Superior technical support: "

 

Michael R. doesn't believe everything he sees on TV, thankfully, because "No wonder the stock market is in turmoil when prices fall by 500% like in the latest Amazon movie G20."

 

Finally, new friend Sandro shared his tale of woe. "Romance was hard enough I was young, and I see not much has changed now!"

 

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Today's Anonymous submitter was reviewing some C++ code, and saw this perfectly reasonable looking pattern.

class SomeClass { public: void setField(int val); int getField(); }

Now, we can talk about how overuse of getters and setters is itself an antipattern (especially if they're trivial- you've just made a public variable with extra steps), but it's not wrong and there are certainly good reasons to be cautious with encapsulation. That said, because this is C++, that getField should really be declared int getField() const- appropriate for any method which doesn't cause a mutation to a class instance.

Or should it? Let's look at the implementation.

void SomeClass::setField(int val) { setGetField(true, val); } void SomeClass::getField() { return setGetField(false); }

Wait, what? Why are we passing a boolean to a method called setGet. Why is there a method called setGet? They didn't go and make a method that both sets and gets, and decide which they're doing based on a boolean flag, did they?

int SomeClass::setGetField(bool set, int val) { static int s_val = 0; if (set) { s_val = val; } return s_val; }

Oh, good, they didn't just make a function that maybe sets or gets based on a boolean flag. They also made the state within that function a static field. And yes, function level statics are not scoped to an instance, so this is shared across all instances of the class. So it's not encapsulated at all, and we've blundered back into Singletons again, somehow.

Our anonymous submitter had two reactions. Upon seeing this the first time, they wondered: "WTF? This must be some kind of joke. I'm being pranked."

But then they saw the pattern again. And again. After seeing it fifty times, they wondered: "WTF? Who hired these developers? And can that hiring manager be fired? Out of a cannon? Into the sun?"

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Now, I would argue that the event-driven lifecycle of ASP .Net WebForms is a bad way to design web applications. And it's telling that the model is basically dead; it seems my take is at best lukewarm, if not downright cold.

Pete inherited code from Bob, and Bob wrote an ASP .Net WebForm many many ages ago, and it's still the company's main application. Bob may not be with the company, but his presence lingers, both in the code he wrote and the fact that he commented frequently with // bob was here

Bob liked to reinvent wheels. Maybe that's why most methods he wrote were at least 500 lines long. He wrote his own localization engine, which doesn't work terribly well. What code he did write, he copy/pasted multiple times.

He was fond of this pattern:

if (SomeMethodReturningBoolean()) { return true; } else { return false; }

Now, in a Web Form, you usually attach your events to parts of the page lifecycle by convention. Name a method Page_Load? It gets called when the load event fires. Page_PreRender? Yep- when the pre-render event fires. SomeField_MouseClick? You get it.

Bob didn't, or Bob didn't like coding by naming convention. Which, I'll be frank, I also don't like coding by naming convention, but it was the paradigm Web Forms favored, it's what the documentation assumed, it's what every other developer was going to expect to see.

Still, Bob had his own Bob way of doing it.

In every page he'd write code like this:

this.PreRender += this.RequestPagePreRender

That line manually registers an event handler, which invokes the method RequestPagePreRender. And while I might object to wiring up events by convention- this is still just a convention. It's not done with any thought at all- every page has this line, even if the RequestPagePreRender method is empty.

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Mark was debugging some database querying code, and got a bit confused about what it was actually doing. Specifically, it generated a query block like this:

$statement="declare @status int declare @msg varchar(30) exec @status=sp_doSomething 'arg1', ... select @msg=convert(varchar(10),@status) print @msg "; $result = sybase_query ($statement, $this->connection);

Run a stored procedure, capture its return value in a variable, stringify that variable and print it. The select/print must be for debugging, right? Leftover debugging code. Why else would you do something like that?

if (sybase_get_last_message()!=='0') { ... }

Oh no. sybase_get_last_message gets the last string printed out by a print statement. This is a pretty bonkers way to get the results of a function or procedure call back, especially when if there are any results (like a return value), they'll be in the $result return value.

Now that said, reading through those functions, it's a little unclear if you can actually get the return value of a stored procedure this way. Without testing it myself (and no, I'm not doing that), we're in a world where this might actually be the best way to do this.

So I'm not 100% sure where the WTF lies. In the developer? In the API designers? Sybase being TRWTF is always a pretty reliable bet. I suppose there's a reason why all those functions are listed as "REMOVED IN PHP 7.0.0", which was was rolled out through 2015. So at least those functions have been dead for a decade.

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We talked about singletons a bit last week. That reminded John of a story from the long ago dark ages where we didn't have always accessible mobile Internet access.

At the time, John worked for a bank. The bank, as all banks do, wanted to sell mortgages. This often meant sending an agent out to meet with customers face to face, and those agents needed to show the customer what their future would look like with that mortgage- payment calculations, and pretty little graphs about equity and interest.

Today, this would be a simple website, but again, reliable Internet access wasn't a thing. So they built a client side application. They tested the heck out of it, and it worked well. Sales agents were happy. Customers were happy. The bank itself was happy.

Time passed, as it has a way of doing, and the agents started clamoring for a mobile web version, that they could use on their phones. Now, the first thought was, "Wire it up to the backend!" but the backend they had was a mainframe, and there was a dearth of mainframe developers. And while the mainframe was the source of truth, and the one place where mortgages actually lived, building a mortgage calculator that could do pretty visualizations was far easier- and they already had one.

The client app was in .NET, and it was easy enough to wrap the mortgage calculation objects up in a web service. A quick round of testing of the service proved that it worked just as well as the old client app, and everyone was happy - for awhile.

Sometimes, agents would run a calculation and get absolute absurd results. Developers, putting in exactly the same values into their test environment wouldn't see the bad output. Testing the errors in production didn't help either- it usually worked just fine. There was a Heisenbug, but how could a simple math calculation that had already been tested and used for years have a Heisenbug?

Well, the calculation ran by simulation- it simply iteratively applied payments and interest to generate the entire history of the loan. And as it turns out, because the client application which started this whole thing only ever needed one instance of the calculator, someone had made it a singleton. And in their web environment, this singleton wasn't scoped to a single request, it was a true global object, which meant when simultaneous requests were getting processed, they'd step on each other and throw off the iteration. And testing didn't find it right away, because none of their tests were simulating the effect of multiple simultaneous users.

The fix was simple- stop being a singleton, and ensure every request got its own instance. But it's also a good example of misapplication of patterns- there was no need in the client app to enforce uniqueness via the singleton pattern. A calculator that holds state probably shouldn't be a singleton in the first place.

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When faced with an information system lacking sufficient richness to permit its users to express all of the necessary data states, human beings will innovate. In other words, they will find creative ways to bend the system to their will, usually (but not always) inconsequentially.

In the early days of information systems, even before electronic computers, we found users choosing to insert various out-of-bounds values into data fields to represent states such as "I don't know the true value for this item" or "It is impossible accurately state the true value of this item because of faulty constraint being applied to the input mechanism" or other such notions.

This practice carried on into the computing age, so that now, numeric fields will often contain values of 9999 or 99999999. Taxpayer numbers will be listed as 000-00-0000 or any other repetition of the same digit or simple sequences. Requirements to enter names collected John Does. Now we also see a fair share of Disney characters.

Programmers then try to make their systems idiot-proof, with the obvious and entirely predictable results.

The mere fact that these inventions exist at all is entirely due to the ommission of mechanisms for the metacommentary that we all know perfectly well is sometimes necessary. But rather than provide those, it's easier to wave our hands and pretend that these unwanted states won't exist, can be ignored, can be glossed over. "Relax" they'll tell you. "It probably won't ever happen." "If it does happen, it won't matter." "Don't lose your head over it."

The Beast in Black certainly isn't inclined to cover up an errant sentinel. "For that price, it had better be a genuine Louis XVI pillow from 21-January-1793." A La Lanterne!

 

Daniel D. doubled up on Error'ds for us. "Do you need the error details? Yes, please."

 

And again with an alert notification oopsie. "Google Analytics 4 never stops surprising us any given day with how bugged it is. I call it an "Exclamation point undefined". You want more info? Just Google it... Oh wait." I do appreciate knowing who is responsible for the various bodges we are sent. Thank you, Daniel.

 

"Dark pattern or dumb pattern?" wonders an anonymous reader. I don't think it's very dark.

 

Finally, Ian Campbell found a data error that doesn't look like an intentional sentinel. But I'm not sure what this number represents. It is not an integral power of 2. Says Ian, "SendGrid has a pretty good free plan now with a daily limit of nine quadrillion seven trillion one hundred ninety-nine billion two hundred fifty-four million seven hundred forty thousand nine hundred ninety-two."

 

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You know what definitely never changes? Shipping prices. Famously static, despite all economic conditions and the same across all shipping providers. It doesn't matter where you're shipping from, or to, you know exactly what the price will be to ship that package at all times.

Wait, what? You don't think that's true? It must be true, because Chris sent us this function, which calculates shipping prices, and it couldn't be wrong, could it?

public double getShippingCharge(String shippingType, bool saturday, double subTot) { double shCharge = 0.00; if(shippingType.Equals("Ground")) { if(subTot <= 29.99 && subTot > 0) { shCharge = 4.95; } else if(subTot <= 99.99 && subTot > 29.99) { shCharge = 7.95; } else if(subTot <= 299.99 && subTot > 99.99) { shCharge = 9.95; } else if(subTot > 299.99) { shCharge = subTot * .05; } } else if(shippingType.Equals("Two-Day")) { if(subTot <= 29.99 && subTot > 0) { shCharge = 14.95; } else if(subTot <= 99.99 && subTot > 29.99) { shCharge = 19.95; } else if(subTot <= 299.99 && subTot > 99.99) { shCharge = 29.95; } else if(subTot > 299.99) { shCharge = subTot * .10; } } else if(shippingType.Equals("Next Day")) { if(subTot <= 29.99 && subTot > 0) { shCharge = 24.95; } else if(subTot <= 99.99 && subTot > 29.99) { shCharge = 34.95; } else if(subTot <= 299.99 && subTot > 99.99) { shCharge = 44.95; } else if(subTot > 299.99) { shCharge = subTot * .15; } } else if(shippingType.Equals("Next Day a.m.")) { if(subTot <= 29.99 && subTot > 0) { shCharge = 29.95; } else if(subTot <= 99.99 && subTot > 29.99) { shCharge = 39.95; } else if(subTot <= 299.99 && subTot > 99.99) { shCharge = 49.95; } else if(subTot > 299.99) { shCharge = subTot * .20; } } return shCharge; }

Next you're going to tell me that passing the shipping types around as stringly typed data instead of enums is a mistake, too!

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Singletons is arguably the easiest to understand design pattern, and thus, one of the most frequently implemented design patterns, even- especially- when it isn't necessary. Its simplicity is its weakness.

Bartłomiej inherited some code which implemented this pattern many, many times. None of them worked quite correctly, and all of them tried to create a singleton a different way.

For example, this one:

public class SystemMemorySettings { private static SystemMemorySettings _instance; public SystemMemorySettings() { if (_instance == null) { _instance = this; } } public static SystemMemorySettings GetInstance() { return _instance; } public void DoSomething() { ... // (this must only be done for singleton instance - not for working copy) if (this != _instance) { return; } ... } }

The only thing they got correct was the static method which returns an instance, but everything else is wrong. They construct the instance in the constructor, meaning this isn't actually a singleton, since you can construct it multiple times. Each new construction replaces the shared instance with a new one.

The real "magic" here, however, is the DoSomething, which checks if the currently active instance is also the most recently constructed instance. If it isn't, this function just fails silently and does nothing.

A common critique of singletons is that they're simply "global variables with extra steps," but this doesn't even succeed at that- it's just a failure, top to bottom.

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Honestly, I don't know what to say about this code sent to us by Austin, beyond "I think somebody was very confused".

string text; text = ""; // snip box.Text = text; text = ""; text = XMLUtil.SanitizeXmlString(text);

This feels like it goes beyond the usual cruft and confusion that comes with code evolving without ever really being thought about, and ends up in some space outside of meaning. It's all empty strings, signifying nothing, but we've sanitized it.

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Do you know what I had forgotten until this morning? That VBScript (and thus, older versions of Visual Basic) don't require you to use parentheses when calling a function. Foo 5 and Foo(5) are the same thing.

Of course, why would I remember that? I thankfully haven't touched any of those languages since about… 2012. Which is actually a horrifyingly short time ago, back when I supported classic ASP web apps. Even when I did, I always used parentheses because I wanted my code to be something close to readable.

Classic ASP, there's a WTF for you. All the joy of the way PHP mixes markup and code into a single document, but with an arguably worse and weirder language.

Which finally, brings us to Josh's code. Josh worked for a traveling exhibition company, and that company had an entirely homebrewed CMS written in classic ASP. Here's a few hundred lines out of their navigation menu.

<ul class=menuMain> <% if menu = "1" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/home.asp' title='Home'>Home</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/home.asp' title='Home'>Home</a></li>" end if if menu = "2" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/about_wc_homepage.asp' title='About World Challenge'>About us</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/about_wc_homepage.asp' title='About World Challenge'>About us</a></li>" end if if menu = "3" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/book-a-school-expedition.asp' title='How to book'>How to book</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/book-a-school-expedition.asp' title='How to book'>How to book</a></li>" end if if menu = "4" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/expeditions_home.asp' title='Expeditions'>Expeditions</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/expeditions_home.asp' title='Expeditions'>Expeditions</a></li>" end if if menu = "5" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/safety_home.asp' title='Safety'>Safety</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/safety_home.asp' title='Safety'>Safety</a></li>" end if if menu = "6" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/mm_what_is_mm.asp' title='Fundraising support'>Fundraising</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/mm_what_is_mm.asp' title='Fundraising support'>Fundraising</a></li>" end if if menu = "7" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/careers_home.asp' title='Work for us'>Work for us</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/careers_home.asp' title='Work for us'>Work for us</a></li>" end if if menu = "8" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/contact_us_home.asp' title='Contact us'>Contact us</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/contact_us_home.asp' title='Contact us'>Contact us</a></li>" end if Response.Write "</ul>" Response.Write "<ul class='menuSub'>" if menu = "1" then end if if menu = "2" then if submenu = "1" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/about_wc_who_we_are.asp' title='Who we are'>Who we are</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/about_wc_who_we_are.asp'title='Who we are'>Who we are</a></li>" end if if submenu = "2" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/world_challenge_CSR.asp' title='CSR'>CSR</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/world_challenge_CSR.asp' title='CSR'>CSR</a></li>" end if if submenu = "3" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/World-Challenge-Accreditation.asp' title='Partners and accreditation'>Partners and accreditation</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/World-Challenge-Accreditation.asp' title='Partners and accreditation'>Partners and accreditation</a></li>" end if if submenu = "4" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/curriculum-links.asp' title='Curriculum links'>Curriculum links</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/curriculum-links.asp' title='Curriculum links'>Curriculum links</a></li>" end if if submenu = "5" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/expedition_advice.asp' title='Expedition advice'>Expedition advice</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/expedition_advice.asp' title='Expedition advice'>Expedition advice</a></li>" end if if submenu = "6" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/about_wc_press_and_publications.asp' title='Press resources'>Press resources</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/about_wc_press_and_publications.asp' title='Press resources'>Press resources</a></li>" end if end if if menu = "3" then Response.Write "<li></li>" end if if menu = "4" then if submenu = "1" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/exped_lh_dest_ca.asp' title='Central & North America'>Central and North America</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/exped_lh_dest_ca.asp' title='Central and North America'>Central and North America</a></li>" end if if submenu = "2" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/exped_lh_dest_sa.asp' title='South America'>South America</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/exped_lh_dest_sa.asp' title='South America'>South America</a></li>" end if if submenu = "3" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/exped_lh_dest_sea.asp' title='South East Asia'>South East Asia</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/exped_lh_dest_sea.asp' title='South East Asia'>South East Asia</a></li>" end if if submenu = "4" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/exped_lh_dest_asia.asp' title='Asia'>Asia</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/exped_lh_dest_asia.asp' title='Asia'>Asia</a></li>" end if if submenu = "5" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/exped_lh_dest_africa.asp' title='Africa'>Africa</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/exped_lh_dest_africa.asp' title='Africa'>Africa</a></li>" end if if submenu = "6" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/europe_school_expeditions.asp' title='Europe'>Europe</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/europe_school_expeditions.asp' title='Europe'>Europe</a></li>" end if if submenu = "7" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/community-projects.asp' title='Community projects'>Community projects</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/community-projects.asp' title='Community projects'>Community projects</a></li>" end if if submenu = "8" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/exped_indiv_home.asp' title='Independent'>Independent</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/exped_indiv_home.asp' title='Independent'>Independent</a></li>" end if end if if menu = "5" then if submenu = "1" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/safe-people.asp' title='Safe People'>Safe people</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/safe-people.asp' title='Safe People'>Safe people</a></li>" end if if submenu = "2" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/safe-place.asp' title='Safe places'>Safe places</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/safe-place.asp' title='Safe places'>Safe places</a></li>" end if if submenu = "3" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/safe-policies-practises.asp' title='Safe practices and policies'>Safe practices and policies</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/safe-policies-practises.asp' title='Safe practices and policies'>Safe practices and policies</a></li>" end if if submenu = "4" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/safe-resources.asp' title='Safe Resources'>Safe resources</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/safe-resources.asp' title='Safe Resources'>Safe resources</a></li>" end if if submenu = "5" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/safety_ops_centre.asp' title='Operations Centre'>Operations Centre</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/safety_ops_centre.asp' title='Operations Centre'>Operations Centre</a></li>" end if if submenu = "6" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/travel_safety_course.asp' title='Travelsafe course'>Travelsafe course</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/travel_safety_course.asp' title='Travelsafe course'>Travelsafe course</a></li>" end if end if if menu = "6" then ' if submenu = "1" then ' Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/fundraising-team.asp' title='Fundraising team'>Fundraising team</a></li>" ' else ' Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/fundraising-team.asp' title='Fundraising team'>Fundraising team</a></li>" ' end if if submenu = "2" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/mm_ideas.asp' title='Fundraising ideas'>Fundraising ideas</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/mm_ideas.asp' title='Fundraising ideas'>Fundraising ideas</a></li>" end if if submenu = "3" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/about_wc_events_challenger_events.asp' title='Fundraising events'>Fundraising events</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/about_wc_events_challenger_events.asp' title='Fundraising events'>Fundraising events</a></li>" end if end if if menu = "7" then if submenu = "1" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/careers_leader_ops_overseas.asp' title='Lead an expedition'>Lead an expedition</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/careers_leader_ops_overseas.asp' title='Lead an expedition'>Lead an expedition</a></li>" end if if submenu = "2" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/permanent_jobs_world_challenge.asp' title='Office based positions'>Office based positions</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/permanent_jobs_world_challenge.asp' title='Office based positions'>Office based positions</a></li>" end if end if if menu = "8" then if submenu = "1" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/pages/forms-brochure.asp' title='Request a brochure'>Request a brochure</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/pages/forms-brochure.asp' title='Request a brochure'>Request a brochure</a></li>" end if if submenu = "2" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a rel='external' href='http://f.chtah.com/s/3/2069554126/signup.html' title='Sign up for e-news'>Sign up for e-news</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a rel='external' href='http://f.chtah.com/s/3/2069554126/signup.html' title='Sign up for e-news'>Sign up for e-news</a></li>" end if if submenu = "3" then Response.Write "<li class='activ'><b></b><i></i><a href='/expeditions/about_wc_press_and_publications.asp' title='Press resources'>Press resources</a></li>" else Response.Write "<li><a href='/expeditions/about_wc_press_and_publications.asp' title='Press resources'>Press resources</a></li>" end if end if %> </ul>

This renders the whole menu, but based on the selected menu and submenu, it adds an activ class to the HTML elements. Which means that each HTML element is defined here twice, once with and without the CSS class on it. I know folks like to talk about dry code, but this code is SOGGY with repetition. Just absolutely dripping wet with the same thing multiple times. Moist.

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I never did explain the elusive off-by-one I hinted at, did I? A little meta, perhaps. It is our practice at Error'd to supply five nuggets of joy each week. But in episode previous-plus-one, you actually got six! (Or maybe, depending on how you count them, that's yet another off-by-one. I slay me.) If that doesn't tickle you enough, just wait until you hear what Dave L. brought us. Meanwhile...

"YATZP" scoffed self-styled Foo AKA F. Yet Another Time Zone P*, I guess. Not wrong. According to Herr Aka F., "German TV teletext (yes, we still have it!) botched the DST start (upper right corner). The editors realized it and posted a message stating as much, sent from the 'future' (i.e. correct) time zone."

 

Michael R. wrote in with a thought-provoker. If I'm representing one o'clock as 1:00, two o'clock as 2:00, and so forth, why should zero o'clock be the only time represented with not just one, but TWO leading zeroes? Logically, zero o'clock should be represented simply by :00, right?

 

Meanwhile, (just) Randy points out that somebody failed to pay attention to detail. "Did a full-scroll on Baeldung's members page and saw this. Sometimes, even teachers don't get it right."

 

In case Michael R. is still job-hunting Gary K. has found the perfect position for everyone. That is, assuming the tantalizingly missing Pay Range section conforms to the established pattern. "Does this mean I should put my qualifications in?" he wondered. Run, don't walk.

 

And in what I think is an all-time first for us, Dave L. brings (drum roll) an audio Error'd "I thought you'd like this recording from my Garmin watch giving me turn-by-turn directions: In 280.097 feet turn right. That's two hundred eighty feet and ONE POINT ONE SIX FOUR INCHES. Accuracy to a third of a millimeter!" Don't move your hand!

Alas, your browser does not support this audio.

 

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Sean sends us a one-line function that is a delight, if by delight you mean "horror". You'll be shocked to know it's PHP.

function proget(){foreach($_GET as $k=>$v){if($k=="h"){$GLOBALS["h"]=1;}$p=explode(",",$k);}return($p);} //function to process GET headers

Based on the comment, proget is a shorthand for process_get_parameters. Which is sort of what it does. Sort of.

Let's go through this. We iterate across our $_GET parameters using $k for the key, $v for the value, but we never reference the value so forget it exists. We're iterating across every key. The first thing we check is if a key "h" exists. We don't look at its value, we just check if it exists, and if it does, we set a global variable. And this, right here, is enough for this to be a WTF. The logic of "set a global variable based on the existence of a query parameter regardless of the value of the query parameter" is… a lot. But then, somehow, this actually gets more out there.

We explode the key on commas (explode being PHP's much cooler name for split), which implies… our keys may be lists of values? Which I feel like is an example of someone not understanding what a "key" is. But worse than that, we just do this for every key, and return the results of performing that operation on the last key. Which means that if this function is doing anything at all, it's entirely dependent on the order of the keys. Which, PHP does order the keys by the order they're added, which I take to mean that if the URL has query params like ?foo=1&h=0&a,b,c,d=wtf. Or, if we're being picky about encoding, ?foo=1&h=0&a%2Cb%2Cc%2Cd=wtf. The only good news here is that PHP handles the encoding/decoding for you, so the explode will work as expected.

This is the kind of bad code that leaves me with lots of questions, and I'm not sure I want any of the answers. How did this happen, and why are questions best left unanswered, because I think the answers might cause more harm.

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Today's anonymous submitter worked for a "large, US-based, e-commerce company." This particular company was, some time back, looking to save money, and like so many companies do, that meant hiring offshore contractors.

Now, I want to stress, there's certainly nothing magical about national borders which turns software engineers into incompetents. The reality is simply that contractors never have their client's best interests at heart; they only want to be good enough to complete their contract. This gets multiplied by the contracting firm's desire to maximize their profits by keeping their contractors as booked as possible. And it gets further multiplied by the remoteness and siloing of the interaction, especially across timezones. Often, the customer sends out requirements, and three months later gets a finished feature, with no more contact than that- and it never goes well.

All that said, let's look at some SQL Server code. It's long, so we'll take it in chunks.

-- =============================================================================== -- Author : Ignacius Ignoramus -- Create date: 04-12-2020 -- Description: SP of Getting Discrepancy of Allocation Reconciliation Snapshot -- ===============================================================================

That the comment reinforces that this is an "SP", aka stored procedure, is already not my favorite thing to see. The description is certainly made up of words, and I think I get the gist.

ALTER PROCEDURE [dbo].[Discrepency] ( @startDate DATETIME, @endDate DATETIME ) AS BEGIN

Nothing really to see here; it's easy to see that we're going to run a query for a date range. That's fine and common.

DECLARE @tblReturn TABLE ( intOrderItemId INT )

Hmm. T-SQL lets you define table variables, which are exactly what they sound like. It's a local variable in this procedure, that acts like a table. You can insert/update/delete/query it. The vague name is a little sketch, and the fact that it holds only one field also makes me go "hmmm", but this isn't bad.

DECLARE @tblReturn1 TABLE ( intOrderItemId INT )

Uh oh.

DECLARE @tblReturn2 TABLE ( intOrderItemId INT )

Oh no.

DECLARE @tblReturn3 TABLE ( intOrderItemId INT )

Oh no no no.

DECLARE @tblReturn4 TABLE ( intOrderItemId INT )

This doesn't bode well.

So they've declared five variables called tblReturn, that all hold the same data structure.

What happens next? This next block is gonna be long.

INSERT INTO @tblReturn --(intOrderItemId) VALUES (@_ordersToBeAllocated) /* OrderItemsPlaced */ select intOrderItemId from CompanyDatabase..Orders o inner join CompanyDatabase..OrderItems oi on oi.intOrderId = o.intOrderId where o.dtmTimeStamp between @startDate and @endDate AND intOrderItemId Not In ( /* _itemsOnBackorder */ select intOrderItemId from CompanyDatabase..OrderItems oi inner join CompanyDatabase..Orders o on o.intOrderId = oi.intOrderId where o.dtmTimeStamp between @startDate and @endDate and oi.strstatus='backordered' ) AND intOrderItemId Not In ( /* _itemsOnHold */ select intOrderItemId from CompanyDatabase..OrderItems oi inner join CompanyDatabase..Orders o on o.intOrderId = oi.intOrderId where o.dtmTimeStamp between @startDate and @endDate and o.strstatus='ONHOLD' and oi.strStatus <> 'BACKORDERED' ) AND intOrderItemId Not In ( /* _itemsOnReview */ select intOrderItemId from CompanyDatabase..OrderItems oi inner join CompanyDatabase..Orders o on o.intOrderId = oi.intOrderId where o.dtmTimeStamp between @startDate and @endDate and o.strstatus='REVIEW' and oi.strStatus <> 'BACKORDERED' ) AND intOrderItemId Not In ( /*_itemsOnPending*/ select intOrderItemId from CompanyDatabase..OrderItems oi inner join CompanyDatabase..Orders o on o.intOrderId = oi.intOrderId where o.dtmTimeStamp between @startDate and @endDate and o.strstatus='PENDING' and oi.strStatus <> 'BACKORDERED' ) AND intOrderItemId Not In ( /*_itemsCancelled */ select intOrderItemId from CompanyDatabase..OrderItems oi inner join CompanyDatabase..Orders o on o.intOrderId = oi.intOrderId where o.dtmTimeStamp between @startDate and @endDate and oi.strstatus='CANCELLED' )

We insert into @tblReturn the result of a query, and this query relies heavily on using a big pile of subqueries to decide if a record should be included in the output- but these subqueries all query the same tables as the root query. I'm fairly certain this could be a simple join with a pretty readable where clause, but I'm also not going to sit here and rewrite it right now, we've got a lot more query to look at.

INSERT INTO @tblReturn1 /* _backOrderItemsReleased */ select intOrderItemId from CompanyDatabase..OrderItems oi inner join CompanyDatabase..orders o on o.intorderid = oi.intorderid where oi.intOrderItemid in ( select intRecordID from CompanyDatabase..StatusChangeLog where strRecordType = 'OrderItem' and strOldStatus in ('BACKORDERED') and strNewStatus in ('NEW', 'RECYCLED') and dtmTimeStamp between @startDate and @endDate ) and o.dtmTimeStamp < @startDate UNION ( /*_pendingHoldItemsReleased*/ select intOrderItemId from CompanyDatabase..OrderItems oi inner join CompanyDatabase..orders o on o.intorderid = oi.intorderid where oi.intOrderID in ( select intRecordID from CompanyDatabase..StatusChangeLog where strRecordType = 'Order' and strOldStatus in ('REVIEW', 'ONHOLD', 'PENDING') and strNewStatus in ('NEW', 'PROCESSING') and dtmTimeStamp between @startDate and @endDate ) and o.dtmTimeStamp < @startDate ) UNION /* _reallocationsowingtonostock */ ( select oi.intOrderItemID from CompanyDatabase.dbo.StatusChangeLog inner join CompanyDatabase.dbo.OrderItems oi on oi.intOrderItemID = CompanyDatabase.dbo.StatusChangeLog.intRecordID inner join CompanyDatabase.dbo.Orders o on o.intOrderId = oi.intOrderId where strOldStatus = 'RECYCLED' and strNewStatus = 'ALLOCATED' and CompanyDatabase.dbo.StatusChangeLog.dtmTimestamp > @endDate and strRecordType = 'OrderItem' and intRecordId in ( select intRecordId from CompanyDatabase.dbo.StatusChangeLog where strOldStatus = 'ALLOCATED' and strNewStatus = 'RECYCLED' and strRecordType = 'OrderItem' and CompanyDatabase.dbo.StatusChangeLog.dtmTimestamp between @startDate and @endDate ) )

Okay, just some unions with more subquery filtering. More of the same. It's the next one that makes this special.

INSERT INTO @tblReturn2 SELECT intOrderItemId FROM @tblReturn UNION SELECT intOrderItemId FROM @tblReturn1

Ah, here's the stuff. This is just bonkers. If the goal is to combine the results of these queries into a single table, you could just insert into one table the whole time.

But we know that there are 5 of these tables, so why are we only going through the first two to combine them at this point?

INSERT INTO @tblReturn3 /* _factoryAllocation*/ select oi.intOrderItemId from CompanyDatabase..Shipments s inner join CompanyDatabase..ShipmentItems si on si.intShipmentID = s.intShipmentID inner join Common.CompanyDatabase.Stores stores on stores.intStoreID = s.intLocationID inner join CompanyDatabase..OrderItems oi on oi.intOrderItemId = si.intOrderItemId inner join CompanyDatabase..Orders o on o.intOrderId = s.intOrderId where s.dtmTimestamp >= @endDate and stores.strLocationType = 'FACTORY' UNION ( /*_storeAllocations*/ select oi.intOrderItemId from CompanyDatabase..Shipments s inner join CompanyDatabase..ShipmentItems si on si.intShipmentID = s.intShipmentID inner join Common.CompanyDatabase.Stores stores on stores.intStoreID = s.intLocationID inner join CompanyDatabase..OrderItems oi on oi.intOrderItemId = si.intOrderItemId inner join CompanyDatabase..Orders o on o.intOrderId = s.intOrderId where s.dtmTimestamp >= @endDate and stores.strLocationType <> 'FACTORY' ) UNION ( /* _ordersWithAllocationProblems */ select oi.intOrderItemId from CompanyDatabase.dbo.StatusChangeLog inner join CompanyDatabase.dbo.OrderItems oi on oi.intOrderItemID = CompanyDatabase.dbo.StatusChangeLog.intRecordID inner join CompanyDatabase.dbo.Orders o on o.intOrderId = oi.intOrderId where strRecordType = 'orderitem' and strNewStatus = 'PROBLEM' and strOldStatus = 'NEW' and CompanyDatabase.dbo.StatusChangeLog.dtmTimestamp > @endDate and o.dtmTimestamp < @endDate )

Okay, @tblReturn3 is more of the same. Nothing more to really add.

INSERT INTO @tblReturn4 SELECT intOrderItemId FROM @tblReturn2 WHERE intOrderItemId NOT IN(SELECT intOrderItemId FROM @tblReturn3 )

Ooh, but here we see something a bit different- we're taking the set difference between @tblReturn2 and @tblReturn3. This would almost make sense if there weren't already set operations in T-SQL which would handle all of this.

Which brings us, finally, to the last query in the whole thing:

SELECT o.intOrderId ,oi.intOrderItemId ,o.dtmDate ,oi.strDescription ,o.strFirstName + o.strLastName AS 'Name' ,o.strEmail ,o.strBillingCountry ,o.strShippingCountry FROM CompanyDatabase.dbo.OrderItems oi INNER JOIN CompanyDatabase.dbo.Orders o on o.intOrderId = oi.intOrderId WHERE oi.intOrderItemId IN (SELECT intOrderItemId FROM @tblReturn4) END

At the end of all this, I've determined a few things.

First, the developer responsible didn't understand table variables. Second,they definitely didn't understand joins. Third, they had no sense of the overall workflow of this query and just sorta fumbled through until they got results that the client said were okay.

And somehow, this pile of trash made it through a code review by internal architects and got deployed to production, where it promptly became the worst performing query in their application. Correction: the worst performing query thus far.

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Many years ago, JP joined a Ruby project. This was in the heyday of Ruby, when every startup on Earth was using it, and if you weren't building your app on Rails, were you even building an app?

Now, Ruby offers a lot of flexibility. One might argue that it offers too much flexibility, especially insofar as it permits "monkey patching": you can always add new methods to an existing class, if you want. Regardless of the technical details, JP and the team saw that massive flexibility and said, "Yes, we should use that. All of it!"

As these stories usually go, that was fine- for awhile. Then one day, a test started failing because a class name wasn't defined. That was already odd, but what was even odder is that when they searched through the code, that class name wasn't actually used anywhere. So yes, there was definitely no class with that name, but also, there was no line of code that was trying to instantiate that class. So where was the problem?

def controller_class(name) "#{settings.app_name.camelize}::Controllers".constantize.const_get("#{name.to_s.camelize}") end def model_class(name) "#{settings.app_name.camelize}".constantize.const_get("#{name.to_s.camelize}") end def resource_class(name) "#{settings.app_name.camelize}Client".constantize.const_get("#{name.to_s.camelize}") end

It happened because they were dynamically constructing the class names from a settings field. And not just in this handful of lines- this pattern occurred all over the codebase. There were other places where it referenced a different settings field, and they just hadn't encountered the bug yet, but knew that it was only a matter of time before changing a settings file was going to break more functionality in the application.

They wisely rewrote these sections to not reference the settings, and dubbed the pattern the "Caramelize Pattern". They added that to their coding standards as a thing to avoid, and learned a valuable lesson about how languages provide footguns.

Since today's April Fool's Day, consider the prank the fact that everyone learned their lesson and corrected their mistakes. I suppose that has to happen at least sometimes.

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Legacy systems are hard to change, and even harder to eliminate. You can't simply do nothing though; as technology and user expectations change, you need to find ways to modernize and adapt the legacy system.

That's what happened to Alicia's team. They had a gigantic, spaghetti-coded, monolithic application that was well past drinking age and had a front-end to match. Someone decided that they couldn't touch the complex business logic, but what they could do was replace the frontend code by creating an adapter service; the front end would call into this adapter, and the adapter would execute the appropriate methods in the backend.

Some clever coder named this "Backend for Frontend" or "BFF".

It was not anyone's BFF. For starters, this system didn't actually allow you to just connect a UI to the backend. No, that'd be too easy. This system was actually a UI generator.

The way this works is that you feed it a schema file, written in JSON. This file specifies what input elements you want, some hints for layout, what validation you want the UI to perform, and even what CSS classes you want. Then you compile this as part of a gigantic .NET application, and deploy it, and then you can see your new UI.

No one likes using it. No one is happy that it exists. Everyone wishes that they could just write frontends like normal people, and not use this awkward schema language.

All that is to say, when Alicia's co-worker stood up shortly before lunch, said, "I'm taking off the rest of the day, BFF has broken me," it wasn't particularly shocking to hear- or even the first time that'd happened.

Alicia, not heeding the warning inherent in that statement, immediately tracked down that dev's last work, and tried to understand what had been so painful.

"minValue": 1900, "maxValue": 99,

This, of course, had to be a bug. Didn't it? How could the maxValue be lower than the minValue?

Let's look at the surrounding context.

{ "type": "eventValueBetweenValuesValidator", "eventType": "CalendarYear", "minValue": 1900, "maxValue": 99, "isCalendarBasedMaxValue": true, "message": "CalendarYear must be between {% raw %}{{minValue}}{% endraw %} and {% raw %}{{maxValue}}{% endraw %}." }

I think this should make it perfectly clear what's happening. Oh, it doesn't? Look at the isCalendarBasedMaxValue field. It's true. There, that should explain everything. No, it doesn't? You're just more confused?

The isCalendarBasedMaxValue says that the maxValue field should not be treated as a literal value, but instead, is the number of years in the future relative to the current year which are considered valid. This schema definition says "accept all years between 1900 and 2124 (at the time of this writing)." Next year, that top value goes up to 2125. Then 2126. And so on.

As features go, it's not a terrible feature. But the implementation of the feature is incredibly counter-intuitive. At the end of the day, this is just bad naming: (ab)using min/max to do something that isn't really a min/max validation is the big issue here.

Alicia writes:

I couldn't come up with something more counterintuitive if I tried.

Oh, don't sell yourself short, Alicia. I'm sure you could write something far, far worse if you tried. The key thing here is that clearly, nobody tried- they just sorta let things happen and definitely didn't think too hard about it.

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We got an unusual rash of submissions at Error'd this week. Here are five reasonably good ones chosen not exactly at random. For those few (everyone) who didn't catch the off-by-one from last week's batch, there's the clue.

"Gotta CAPTCHA 'Em All," puns Alex G. "So do I select them all?" he wondered. I think the correct answer is null.

 

"What does a null eat?" wondered B.J.H , "and is one null invited or five?". The first question is easily answered. NaaN, of course. Probably garlic. I would expect B.J. to already know the eating habits of a long-standing companion, so I am guessing that the whole family is not meant to tag along. Stick with just the one.

 

Planespotter Rick R. caught this one at the airport. "Watching my daughter's flight from New York and got surprised by Boeing's new supersonic 737 having already arrived in DFW," he observed. I'm not quite sure what went wrong. It's not the most obvious time zone mistake I can imagine, but I'm pretty sure the cure is the same: all times displayed in any context that is not purely restricted to a single location (and short time frame) should explicitly include the relevant timezone.

 

Rob H. figures "From my day job's MECM Software Center. It appears that autocorrect has miscalculated, because the internet cannot be calculated." The internet is -1.

 

Ending this week on a note of hope, global warrior Stewart may have just saved the planet. "Climate change is solved. We just need to replicate the 19 March performance of my new solar panels." Or perhaps I miscalculated.

 

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Barry rolled into work at 8:30AM to see the project manager waiting at the door, wringing her hands and sweating. She paced a bit while Barry badged in, and then immediately explained the issue:

Today was a major release of their new features. This wasn't just a mere software change; the new release was tied to major changes to a new product line- actual widgets rolling off an assembly line right now. And those changes didn't work.

"I thought we tested this," Barry said.

"We did! And Stu called in sick today!"

Stu was the senior developer on the project, who had written most of the new code.

"I talked to him for a few minutes, and he's convinced it's a data issue. Something in the metadata or something?"

"I'll take a look," Barry said.

He skipped grabbing a coffee from the carafe and dove straight in.

Prior to the recent project, the code had looked something like this:

if (IsProduct1(_productId)) _programId = 1; elseif (IsProduct2(_productId)) _programId = 2; elseif (IsProduct3(_productId)) _programId = 3;

Part of the project, however, was about changing the workflow for "Product 3". So Stu had written this code:

if (IsProduct1(_productId)) _programId = 1; else if (IsProduct2(_productId)) _programId = 2; else if (IsProduct3(_productId)) _programId = 3; DoSomethingProductId3Specific1(); DoSomethingProductId3Specific2(); DoSomethingProductId3Specific3();

Since this is C# and not Python, it took Barry all of 5 seconds to spot this and figure out what the problem was and fix it:

if (IsProduct1(_productId)) { _programId = 1; } else if (IsProduct2(_productId)) { _programId = 2; } else if (IsProduct3(_productId)) { _programId = 3; DoSomethingProductId3Specific1(); DoSomethingProductId3Specific2(); DoSomethingProductId3Specific3(); }

This brings us to about 8:32. Now, given the problems, Barry wasn't about to just push this change- in addition to running pipeline tests (and writing tests that Stu clearly hadn't), he pinged the head of QA to get a tester on this fix ASAP. Everyone worked quickly, and that meant by 9:30 the fix was considered good and ready to be merged in and pushed to production. Sometime in there, while waiting for a pipeline to complete, Barry managed to grab a cup of coffee to wake himself up.

While Barry was busy with that, Stu had decided that he wasn't feeling that sick after all, and had rolled into the office around 9:00. Which meant that just as Barry was about to push the button to run the release pipeline, an "URGENT" email came in from Stu.

"Hey, everybody, I fixed that bug. Can we get this released ASAP?"

Barry went ahead and released the version that he'd already tested, but out of morbid curiosity, went and checked Stu's fix.

if (IsProduct1(_productId)) _programId = 1; else if (IsProduct2(_productId)) _programId = 2; else if (IsProduct3(_productId)) { _programId = 3; } if (IsProduct3(_productId)) { DoSomethingProductId3Specific1(); DoSomethingProductId3Specific2(); DoSomethingProductId3Specific3(); }

At least this version would have worked, though I'm not sure Stu fully understands what "{}"s mean in C#. Or in most programming languages, if we're being honest.

With Barry's work, the launch went off just a few minutes later than the scheduled time. Since the launch was successful, at the next company "all hands", the leadership team made sure to congratulate the people instrumental in making it happen: that is to say, the lead developer of the project, Stu.

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If you need a unique ID, UUIDs provide a variety of options. It's worth noting that variants 1, 2, and 7 all incorporate a timestamp into the UUID. In the case of variant 7, this has the benefit of making the UUID sortable, which can be convenient in many cases (v1/v2 incorporate a MAC address which means that they're sortable if generated with the same NIC).

I bring this up because Dave inherited some code written by a "guru". Said guru was working before UUIDv7 was a standard, but also didn't have any problems that required sortable UUIDs, and thus had no real reason to use timestamp based UUIDs. They just needed some random identifier and, despite using C#, didn't use the UUID functions built in to the framework. No, they instead did this:

string uniqueID = String.Format("{0:d9}", (DateTime.UtcNow.Ticks / 10) % 1000000000);

A Tick is 100 nanoseconds. We divide that by ten, mod by a billion, and then call that our unique identifier.

This is, as you might guess, not unique. First there's the possibility of timestamp collisions: generating two of these too close together in time would collide. Second, the math is just complete nonsense. We divide Ticks by ten (converting hundreds of nanoseconds into thousands of nanoseconds), then we mod by a billion. So every thousand seconds we loop and have a risk of collision again?

Maybe, maybe, these are short-lived IDs and a thousand seconds is plenty of time. But even if that's true, none of this is a good way to do that.

I suppose the saving grace is they use UtcNow and not Now, thus avoiding situations where collisions also happen because of time zones?

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