Alex Papadimoulis

The Storray Engine was originally published on November 23, 2006

The Chief Development Manager was originally published on April 4, 2007.

There are a few interesting things in software development that you’ll generally only learn about by working on “certain” types of applications. Take, for example, the HTTP 414 “Way Too F#%&ing Long” response: there’s no standardized upper limit and many web servers don’t even document how long GET requests may be.

Merry Christmas! It Doubles as a Saw Horse was originally published on November 3, 2006.

“My company has an enormous, in-house built network management application that has every conceivable feature,” Matthew E wrote. “It has everything and does anything that you can imagine... including nothing. And it accomplishes the latter feature with a small-but-conspicuous button labeled Do Not Click.”

You get what you pay for. Ondra M didn’t use those exact words, but that’s effectively what told his friend and colleague, Derrick. “There’s a reason it costs one tenth as much to build in Kerbleckistan,” were Ondra’s exact words, “there’s not only the language barrier, but time zone differences, cultural diff—”

"At one end of the system," Steve A writes "we have a fairly simple HTML-form that displayed a handful of shipping-related fields. At that the other end, there's a database table that pretty much matches those fields one-to-one. But in the middle.... there's a lot more."

Ever since the first Free Sticker Week ended back in February '07, I've been sending out WTF Stickers to anyone that mailed me a SASE or a small souvenir. More recently, I've been sending out the coveted TDWTF Mugs for truly awesome souvenirs. Nothing specific; per the instructions page, "anything will do." Well, here goes anything, yet again! (previous: The Cookout).

"Our database has a table called Year, and below are its contents" notes Suzy T "Want to guess which column is the primary key? You said 'ReferenceId', right? Bzzt, wrong! It's YearValue, of course. I feel like populating ReferenceId with dates from the 1970's just to see what happens. And lord help us in 2013... "

Between The Alliance / Bad Code Offsets, helping out the advertising team for Stack Overflow, the day job, and a new special project that Mark and I have taken on (to be announced soon), I have once again fallen behind on today's The Daily WTF article. But that's where I was hoping you might be able to help out.

When it comes to clever coding, there’s a fine line between amazingly brilliant and incredibly stupid. Take DocumentDotWrite.js, for example. It's a single-line JavaScript file that’s served (http://rmd.atdmt.com/tl/DocumentDotWrite.js) seemingly all the time by Microsoft’s Atlas advertising platform.

"Message when do install Bematech Printer," Matt writes, "but in the end, I successed!

The Denny's Interview (from Bruce W) Not too long ago, "TaxQuik" announced major layoffs at the company, and I found myself to be one of the unfortunate few to be without a job. Nervous about being out of work, I found myself responding to just about every job posting that was remotely related to technology. Including a Monster job ad for a "Web site developer".

There was something that seemed a bit off kilter about Victor C’s new boss. He was a nice guy and all, but his social skills seemed to be somewhat lacking. There weren’t any glaring red flags, but Victor noticed a few things in the interview – nervous leg bouncing, awkward small talk, and a way-too-frequent throat-clearing – that weren’t exactly typical. Then again, it was Victor’s first real job, so he hardly had a frame of reference. Maybe all programmer-turned-CEO’s had a few quirks like that?

Like most of his past jobs, Don R started at a new company with high hopes and low expectations. And also like many of his past jobs, his dreams were quickly whisked away. This time, it happened on his first support ticket.

Please show your support for The Daily WTF by checking out the companies that have been kind enough to sponsor us. And, in doing so, I’m sure you’ll find some pretty cool products and services built by like-minded developers and IT professionals.

Two weeks ago, I announced the Bad Code Offsets project. It's a way to undo the bad code you other people have written without actually replacing the bad code. Much like carbon offsets, money used to buy Bad Code Offsets goes towards open-source projects which not only produce good code, but produce software that helps developers build good software.

Brad’s phone rang with the telltale tone of an inner-office call. “Yeah,” he briskly blurted out as he picked up the phone, “what’cha ya need?” That was actually his nice way of answering the phone. As the senior trader at Æxecor, one of the world’s largest energy trading companies, Brad didn’t need to impress anyone and, in his mind, displaying anything less than vicious hubris would be a sign of weakness.