As we plow into the holiday season, it’s important to remember that each submission- each bit of bad code, each horror story, each personal confession- is its own little gift to us. And, when you write a bit of bad code, you can think of it as a gift for whoever follows you.

Georgeanna recently opened a gift. She was wondering how their logging layer managed its configuration. She assumed that it would just read it from the config file, but when she tried to change where the logging file got written, say, to report.log, it would turn into report.log.staging.log.

It wasn’t hard to figure out why:

if ($env === "staging") {
    $logpath = self::getLogPath();
    /* Since the staging environment uses the same .ini as the
    * production environment, do an override here. */
    self::$logfile = $logpath . "staging.log";
}

The comment sums it up. Instead of managing multiple configuration files and deciding which one to use when you deploy the code, this just used one single config file and then conditionals to decide what behavior to use.

This reminds me of a gift I opened once. I once worked for a company where every application was supposed to reference the standard Environment.dll, and then check isProd or isStaging or isDev and use conditionals to change behavior (instead of having a per-environment config file).

Worse still was what happened when I opened the DLL code: it just checked c:\environment.txt which had “prod”, “stage”, or “dev” written in it. No, it didn’t handle exceptions.

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/caga-tio