The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Text Should Go Here

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2020-01-17

"The fact that Microsoft values my PC's health over copyediting is why I thumbed up this window," Eric wrote.

8 comments - Last comment @ 10:18

Switch Off

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-01-16

There are certain things which you see in code that, at first glance, if you haven’t already learned better, look like they might almost be clever. One of those in any construct that starts with:

switch(true) {…}

35 comments - Last comment @ 02:29

Y2K15

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2020-01-15

We’re still in the early part of the year, and as little glitches show up from “sliding window” fixes to the Y2K bug, we’re seeing more and more little stories of other date rollover weirdness in our inbox.

Like, for example, the Y2K15 bug, which Encore got to get surprised with. It feels like date issues are turning into a sports game franchise: new releases of the same thing every year.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-16

Gormless and Gone

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2020-01-14

There’s always a hope that in the future, our code will be better. Eventually, we won’t be dealing with piles of krufty legacy code and unprepared programmers and business users who don’t understand how clicking works. It’s 2020: we officially live in the future. Things aren’t better.

Duane works in Go, and has a piping hot “Representative Line” written in 2020. If, like me, you don’t quite know Go, it still looks pretty terrible at first glance:

18 comments - Last comment @ 04:28

An Unreal Json Parser

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-01-13

As we've discussed in the past, video game code probably shouldn't be held to the standards of your average WTF: they're operating under wildly different constraints. So, for example, when a popular indie game open sources itself, and people find all sorts of horrors in the codebase: hey, the game shipped and made money. This isn't life or death stuff.

It's a little different when you're building the engine. You're not just hacking together whatever you need to make your product work, but putting together a reusable platform to make other people's products work.

13 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-15

Are You Old Enough to Know Better?

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2020-01-10

"I guess my kid cousins won't be putting these together for a while," Travis writes.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-16

The Compliance Ropeway

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2020-01-09

"So, let me get this straight," Derrick said. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath while massaging his temples before letting out an exasperated sigh. "Not a single person... in this entire organization... is taking ANY responsibility for Ropeway? No one is even willing to admit that they know anything about this application...?"

The Operations team had grown accustomed to their new director's mannerisms and learned it's just better to stay silent and let Derrick think out loud. Afterall, no one envied his job or his idealistic quest for actual compliance. If had he been at the bank as long as his team had, Derrick would have learned that there's compliance... and then there's "compliance."

33 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-15

Sharing the Power

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-01-08

"For my sins," John writes, "I'm working on a SharePoint 2010 migration."

This tells us that John has committed a lot of sins. But not as many as one of his coworkers.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-12