If you've been programming for any length of time, you know the "joy" of working with someone else's code. When taking over a project, the first inclination I've seen with most programmers is to go in and format everything to what they'd like (or duplicate functionality). This is where the problem comes in, the trend that Michael Kimsal talks about in his new blog post - something he wonders about being an "antipattern".

I was discussing things with my brother the other day and I came up with a problem which he helped name. I'm currently maintaining some code, and it's quite a jumble. One of the things I can tell is that one of my predecessors began adding new sections of code to clean up the logic in other areas of the code. However, what never happened was the clean up of the old code, so now there's two places where the same set of data is retrieved in different ways.

He proposes the name "Multi Master Data" for the situation - two different sources, living in the same code, doing the same thing. Of course, he also mentions a situation where this type of problem can cause real issues, especially when trying to track down a bug (a bang your head on the desk moment).