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How not to check the validity of an email address

dellsystem.me

121–130 of 243 posts

Re: How not to check the validity of an email address

#121
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Switching it to use a single properly formatted SQL reduced load times to under a second. We need you to change it back because the system that scrapes that page is relying on the page load time.

What's worse is when fake delays are put into the code because (stupid) people think that the computer can't possibly be doing a good job if it retrieves the results in under a second. If it's "thinking", it's working well!

I thought the fake delays were so the programmer could cash in on doing optimisations at a later date.

Re: How not to check the validity of an email address

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they had used HTML5 local storage and missed the fact that HTML5 has a pretty nice offline caching feature?

Don't judge them too harshly. I am currently developing web app with offline capabilities. FT which provide the scaffolding code recommend using the cache manifest only for the absolutely minimum requirements (jquery + 10 lines of html) and use local storage for all the rest. I suppose they know what they are talking about.

Maybe, but I'd worry that they're only suggesting that because the appcache can be a pain to work with.

localStorage is synchronous, and so putting huge amounts of data in there can delay page load.

Re: How not to check the validity of an email address

#124
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decade is a long time at a single job... Try six months for a good start :)

Six months? I come in after the weekend and constantly want to rewrite the whole goddamn thing.

This^ and I'm only a student; I'll write a program in the evening and by the following morning I'm all, no, no, no!

Re: How not to check the validity of an email address

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Needs disrupting

It's extremely hard to break into because like healthcare these gigantic institutions where nobody can get fired made choices ten to twenty years ago that have now become "the way it's done" and they won't accept a better solution.

I know. I am at one of those institutions. We practically have a social sciences lab for the Dunning-Kruger effect in place of IT decision makers.

Re: How not to check the validity of an email address

#126
post #40

Gosh. For some reason, the "right answer" I expected to see was "do not try to validate the address; just send the e-mail and handle the bounce if it fails". There is a whole other layer which is very good at handling incorrect or undeliverable addresses.

I recently sat in on a presentation regarding javascript module loading. Someone in our company had taken it upon themselves to roll their own solution, because, shit, they're being paid and apparently have no oversight. The solution involved creating an entire cache/hash layer on the client using local storage. At the end of the presentation I had to try to be as respectful as possible when I asked why basic browser…

Perhaps they wanted it to work even when offline? It can be a struggle to get basic browser caching to work nicely in online/offline scenarios. As arethuza points out though, that is better addressed using appcache.

I could imagine doing something like this if you wanted to support say es6 modules, and so each file needed to be processed after it was loaded to work in the current browser. In that case, I can imagine wanting to cache a processed one on the client side, although if you control your whole stack, it'd be better to do that work on the server.

Re: How not to check the validity of an email address

#128

In college I was hired to build an auction site. I was billing my client $20 / hour and subcontracting out the work to some of my fellow classmates at $10 / hour. I was swamped with other work and didn't have much time to review the code. I just made sure it satisfied the specifications and shipped it. We launched the site and did a few hundred thousands dollars worth of transactions in the first 24 hours. Then somet…

This story almost had me in tears (a mix of schadenfreude and shame for my profession). I hope they learned something not to give business critical work to college students. Makes me think that IT Risk management should be right at the top of what MBAs have to learn.

Wow. Just because someone is a college student doesn't mean they are incompetent! Plenty of people do business critical work as college students, haven't you ever heard of co-op before? A degree doesn't make you competent either, I've worked with enough people who have degrees who are completely incompetent. College students might need some extra supervision to make sure they are doing the right thing, but so do jr engineers.

Anyways, those are the things that a code review would catch.

Re: How not to check the validity of an email address

#129
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From now on, when you see a post taking the form "Clearly [obviously bad idea]", please read it out loud in The Simpson's Comic Book Guy voice and place extra emphasis on the irony. This ensures you will get the correct intent 99% of the time.

Clearly, acting like a dumbfuck in order to become enlightened is obviously the right thing to do.

'eh; keep trying, you'll catch on someday.

Re: How not to check the validity of an email address

#130
> I would really like to know the combination and quantities of drugs consumed that resulted in this code. Do you know? Can you hook me up?

Meth. Two week binge. SilkRoad.

I can't imagine opiates did that.

And the only thing you'd do on coke is more coke in combination with hating yourself; not coding shit like this up.

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