I wrote an app that does a different but perhaps even more appalling crime. The app was for displaying time-series data. The data displayed was only generated

I wrote an app that does a different but perhaps even more appalling crime. The app was for displaying time-series data. The data displayed was only generated during business hours. We usually wanted to view a span of a couple of weeks. Displaying it naively, with real time along the x-axis would mean that three-quarters of the display was blank, with only 40 of a week's 168 hours in use. The obvious thing to do is to elide the blank bits, and just show the spans of time with data (with a little gap in between). But the charting library i was using didn't have the concept of a discontinuous or nonlinear x-axis. So i wrote a class called TimeCompressor that would collect a set of time-series data, indexed by epoch timestamp, and rewrite the timestamps so that empty spans of time would be compressed. The earliest timestamp in the dataset stays the same, but later ones may be slid earlier in time to compress empty spans. The resulting indices are numbers which look mostly like epoch timestamps, and in some cases actually are epoch timestamps, but really aren't epoch timestamps. This was all done in JavaScript, so there wasn't a convenient way to wrap the not-really-timestamp indices in a type to mark them as such. So, in this application, when there's a field called somethingTimestamp and it has a large integer that looks like a timestamp in it, sometimes it's a timestamp, and sometimes it isn't! I am hoping this application will be retired before i ever need to work on it again.