What are you coding?

Not Games
#94

Unit tests. I’ve been writing so many unit tests.
We have a big change in one of the main classes of our underlying model and we need to make sure it all behaves and as such unit tests just help to act as a specification to program against.

I really like a feature of testng (java lib) that I only encountered for the first time in this project. The “dataprovider” annotation allows me to hand an iterator to a unit test method and it uses those to parametrize and execute each test case as an actual unit even if it is just one method being filled with different datapoints. I love that. So my test cases become more or less a table of value combinations. This helps me define enough of them easily and not overlook certain combinations of possible inputs and we found our first bug within the first 16 test cases.

7 Likes
#95

Same. We’re trying to improve our code coverage across the board at the start of the year so I’m trying to fill in some gaps. It’s been OK, though the workflow for getting the figures is awful so I’ve got someone looking at moving us to GTest in the meantime.

4 Likes
#96

Yay for comprehensive test coverage! One of our software teams is doing an “upgrade” (read: nuke it from orbit) of an old, clunky piece of software which currently has… Almost no tests. Strangely enough people keep finding bugs!

3 Likes
#97

Anyone who wants to add more tests to the forum dice roller, feel free! :slight_smile: (It had none when I forked it.)

5 Likes
#98
4 Likes
Wordle - A daily word game
#99

I hate working with timeseries…

1 Like
#100

Reminds me of when I installed Linux on a bunch of old iMacs (the original PPC ones that were funky colours) for a uni project and discovered that if you didn’t immediately set the time on first boot, any subsequent boot would fail because they thought it was 01/01/1900.

I’m also a big fan of the different epoch dates various systems use. Particularly where Lotus fucked it up and then Excel kept the fuck-up.

3 Likes
#101

That Lotus/Excel oddity caused me no small amount of headaches during my PhD…

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#102

Dates and times are a nightmare, yes!

That one is a relatively reasonable error.

I protest their definition of “programmer” at this point. After all, I can throw some paint at a canvas, but that doesn’t make me a painter.

2 Likes
#103

I was expecting, after “a leap year happens every four years”, to see “except for years ending with 00”. (Yes, I did Y2K work.)

#104

Every now and then I hear someone suggesting that, because nothing terrible happened, Y2K was just a lot of fuss over nothing. As if people hadn’t spent considerable effort to achieve that outcome.

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#105

Today I learned that some climate models assume that every month has 30 days (no I don’t know why). This is upsetting our Devs and amusing me enormously.

4 Likes
#106

Perhaps. But I do remember my friend in college freaking out about Y2K just before New Year’s, thinking everything was going to come crashing down, seeming to completely ignore the fact that companies had been working to prevent anything bad from happening for quite some time. My friend, who was going through the IT program with me.

I’ll give you two guesses as to who was right about the issue. :wink:

1 Like
#107

Top search result:

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#108

There were a bunch of real failures a few years (okay, often 20) later, when the people who decieded that a window was the right thing ran out of window.

#109

Too bad Bowie never did a song about that.

#110

I am in a state of whoosh.

1 Like
#111

laziness. (if we’re honest)

#112

I used to work on a product that did resource scheduling. When I started, the test suite was littered with tests that made thèse kinds of assumptions. They worked 98% of the time, and would fail because the test started at 2:59:55, and rolled into 3:00. Or whatever the boundary was, hours and minutes, mostly. the day rollover bugs we didn’t see too much, because of when we ran tests. I spent a month cleaning up 500 or so of them . Some got fixed, some had to be run with fixed starting times.

2 Likes
#113

  • I am writing Integrationtests this time. I keep forgetting that to test the “fixed” code, I need to redeploy. Duh.

  • when you don’t specify stuff before, you get a stack of “omg we should have thought of that” realizations that keep you reworking the same few statements over and over and over. So glad I suggested we use unit-tests as a kind of spec.

  • really grateful for modern IDEs having a “local history” after I messed up with git once again. Local history ftw! (obviously only needed by idiots who keep uncommitted changes somewhere on their harddrive or people who aren’t using version control properly. both → me)

2 Likes