The Daily WTF

A few months ago, Sean had some tasks around building a front-end for some dashboards. Someone on the team picked a UI library for managing their widgets. It had lovely features like handling flexible grid layouts, collapsing/expanding components, making components full screen and even drag-and-drop widget rearrangement.

It was great, until one day it wasn’t. As more and more people started using the front end, they kept getting more and more reports about broken dashboards, misrendering, duplicated widgets, and all sorts of other difficult to explain bugs. These were bugs which Sean and the other developers had a hard time replicating, and even on the rare occassions that they did replicate it, they couldn’t do it twice in a row.

Stumped, Sean took a peek at the code. Each on-screen widget was assigned a unique ID. Except at those times when the screen broke- the IDs weren’t unique. So

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