The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Case of the Missing Signal

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2016-10-18

"My satellite connection is down," reported the user on the phone. "Can you help me?"

6 comments - Last comment @ 07:21

Excellent Test

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-10-17

These days, you aren’t just doing development. Your development has to be driven. Business driven. Domain driven. Test driven.

TDD is generally held up as a tool for improving developer efficiency and code quality. As it turns out, scholarly research doesn’t support that: there’s no indication that TDD has any impact at all.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2016-10-17

Breaking News! (or Just a Test?)

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2016-10-14

"Hey, Angela! Helio is working!" writes Lawrence R.

27 comments - Last comment @ 07:22

Guaranteed LOC PITA

by Maciej Stachowski in Feature Articles on 2016-10-13

The task Tama set out to accomplish was rather straightforward. One of the clients had a legacy inventory management application, and they needed a simple text field added to an entry form.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2016-10-16

A Rusty Link

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-10-12

Kevin did the freelance thing, developing websites for small businesses. Sometimes, they had their own IT teams that would own the site afterwards, and perform routine maintenance. In those cases, they often dictated their technical standards, like “use VB.Net with WebForms”.

Kevin took a job, delivered the site, and moved onto the next job. Years later, that company needed some new features added. They called him in to do the work. He saw some surprises in the way the code base had changed.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2016-10-14

All Zipped Up

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2016-10-11

Moving to version control is hard. It's a necessary step as a company grows into developing more complex software, with more developers working on the various products, but that doesn't make it any easier. Like all change, it's often delayed far too long, half-assed, and generally resented until everyone's forgotten about the indignity and moved on to complaining about the next improvement.

30 comments - Last comment @ 2016-10-12

Grumpy Cat

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-10-10

At the end of the lecture session, students immediately started packing up their laptops to race across campus for their next class. Andrew’s professor droned on, anyway, describing their assignment. “I’ve provided parser code,” he said, “so you can just download the datafile and use it.”

He had more to say, but no one was paying attention. Perhaps he even had a correction to the assignment- because when Andrew went to download the data file for the assignment 404ed.

31 comments - Last comment @ 2016-10-15

Let's Do the Timestamp Again!

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2016-10-07

"I am fairly certain that the data within this .csv file contains the secret of time travel," Merrick writes.

26 comments - Last comment @ 06:23