[JScarry]

I'm fixing someone else’s code right now and a few single line comments would have saved my client thousands of dollars.

Today I put in a log statement to see why the code deletes data from the database if there is no new temperature data for the time period. The cron job has been running all day and so far every time it attempts to delete the data, there is no data to delete.

Another line runs a different script if the time is 15:00. No idea what is magical about that time. I added a bunch of log statements to see what happens at 15:00 that is different from every other hour of the day. So far I have no clue.

I’m sure the original coder had a reason for inserting these bits of code, but damned if I know what it was.

There are dozens of instances like this in the code. A one line comment would have saved me hours of work and the client several thousand dollars.

[ams6110]

I'll go one better: I've got servers in my machine room that I don't know the purpose of. Literally in some cases the way I've found out what they do is shut them off and wait for someone to complain.

[vinceguidry]

I've seen stuff like that before, typically it's intended to be temporary code put in as a way of troubleshooting or achieving a non-standard result but wasn't cleaned up properly. I see that so often that I simply assume it's the case and not even try to run it down any further. Just make it work properly and move on.

[sdenton4]

Deleting from any empty database could just be a sanity check. If it's logically supposed to be empty at a given time, it's a perfect time to clean up database errors...