DevDisasters

The End of Days

It's a situation a coder should never have to face: perpetuating bad coding practices from years ago, or just fixing the darn thing!

• By Mark Bowytz
• 04/16/2014

You don't have to know Bruce C. for very long to understand he has a negative opinion toward long meetings about key performance indicators, milestones and department goals.

He felt such things were not only a complete waste of productive time, but a torturous exercise right up there with passing a kidney stone during a complex dental procedure.

Knowing this, you can imagine how Bruce felt as he settled in for a mandatory two-hour-long PowerPoint slide deck-a-palooza with the rest of his department.

It was around the halfway mark during this meeting -- just as Chris, Bruce's manager, was getting into his groove discussing deliverables for the next quarter -- when the presentation was interrupted by an unexpected Outlook reminder pop-up: "Never Forget 6/1/2010!"

Chris chuckled. "Oh no! How'd that get there? Yep, I'll never forget back when I was a developer! Sometimes I wish I could go back to those days!" and then quickly dismissed the reminder, to the amusement of the developers in attendance.

Although an interesting disruption, it didn't take long for Bruce to return to daydreaming, wishing that he, too, could get back to writing code.

Later, after Bruce had been reseated back in normal reality, he received an e-mail from his manager with an attached SQL file:

Bruce opened the attachment, inspected the code and noticed the areas where Chris had made some recent adjustments:

DECLARE @StartDate datetime
DECLARE @EndDate datetime
DECLARE @LoopDate datetime

SET @StartDate = '06/01/2014' --'06/01/2010' --'06/01/2005'
SET @EndDate = '05/31/2019' --'05/31/2014' --'05/31/2009'
SET @LoopDate = @StartDate

WHILE @LoopDate <= @EndDate
BEGIN
INSERT INTO [Dim_Date]
           ([SK_Date_ID]
           ,[Date]
           ,[Day]
           ,[Month]
           ,[Quarter]
           ,[Year])
     VALUES
           (
           CONVERT(int, convert(varchar(255), @LoopDate,112))
           ,@LoopDate
           ,Day(@LoopDate)
           ,Month(@LoopDate)
           ,CASE WHEN Month(@LoopDate) IN (1, 2, 3) THEN 1
                 WHEN Month(@LoopDate) IN (4, 5, 6) THEN 2
                 WHEN Month(@LoopDate) IN (7, 8, 9) THEN 3
                 WHEN Month(@LoopDate) IN (10, 11, 12) THEN 4
              END
           ,Year(@LoopDate)
           )
 SET @LoopDate = DateAdd(d, 1, @LoopDate)
END

A quick query revealed that the Dim_Date table held an entry for each date in the ranges that were commented out, starting in 2005 and going through to 2014.

Bruce knew that what he was being asked to do was utterly and completely wrong in every way. He knew in his heart that perpetuating a simple table of dates and date information that could be easily calculated on-the-fly by code written by the newest of newbie developers wasn't the way to go. But he proceeded anyway, as June 1 was coming soon -- no way could he squeeze in testing and authorizations. He ran the script, as requested, and expanded Dim_Date out by several hundred more rows, to hopefully stave off failure for several more years.

Bruce sent a simple reply, explaining that he ran the script, but also insisting that it be replaced with a common function to calculate date information instead of storing the static values in a table. To show he was serious, he also included a listing of the two dozen or so dependent objects to the Dim_Date table that he could find in Team Foundation Server.

The reply back from Chris was swift:

Soon after, Bruce received a calendar invite with the title, "Don't Forget about Dim_Date," dated not for an arbitrary point near the end of the year, but rather for today's date, in 2019, with the description, "Just in case one of us forgets," and the previously used SQL included.

Bruce accepted the invite, but was concerned he might not be around to perform the update. In the end, he had some serious doubts as to his longevity in the department, especially if his and Chris' goals weren't aligned.