The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Irritants Make Perls

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-13

Grün works for a contracting company. It's always been a small shop, but a recent glut of contracts meant that they needed to staff up. Lars, the boss, wanted more staff, but didn't want to increase the amount paid in salaries any more than absolutely necessary, so he found a "clever" solution. He hired college students, part time, and then threw them in the deep end of Perl code, a language some of them had heard of, but none of them had used.

It didn't go great.

12 comments - Last comment @ 05:32

Not Impossible

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-01-10

Someone online said we run a Mickey Mouse outfit. Angered beyond words, we consulted [email protected] and they threatened to find that guy and sue him. So to anyone else who thinks this column is Goofy, you should know that the world's definitive authorities insist that it absolutely is not.

But these guys? This website actually is kind of goofy, according to resolutioner Adam R. who crowed "Someone forgot to localize some text for the new year!"

6 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-13

Crossly Joined

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-09

Antonio's team hired some very expensive contractors and consultants to help them build a Java based application. These contractors were very demure, very mindful, about how using ORMs could kill performance.

So they implemented a tool that would let them know any time the Hibernate query generator attempted to perform a cross join.

13 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-10

My Identification

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-08

Bejamin's team needed to generate a unique session ID value that can't easily be guessed. The traditional way of doing this would be to generate cryptographically secure random bytes. Most languages, including PHP, have a solution for doing that.

But you could also do this:

23 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-13

Generate JSON

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2025-01-07

Today's anonymous submission is a delightfully simple line of JavaScript which really is an archetype of a representative line.

$json = "{";

14 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-10

Mr Number

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-06

Ted's company hired a contract team to build an application. The budget eventually ran out without a finished application, so the code the contract team had produced was handed off to Ted's team to finish.

This is an example of the Ruby code Ted inherited:

12 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-07

Monkeys

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-01-03

Happy 2025 to all our readers. I can already tell this year's columns are going to be filled with my (least) favorite form of WTF, the impossible endless gauntlet of flaming password hurdles to jump over or crawl under. Please comment if you know why this week's column has this title and why it doesn't have the title Swordfish.

Peter G. starts off our new year of password maladies with a complaint that is almost poetic.
"Between desire and reality.
Between fact and breakfast.
Between 8 and -6:00.
Madness lies, lies, lies..."

17 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-08

intint

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-02

Ash's company outsourced to an offshore vendor.

This is an example of what they got back:

10 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-08