CodeSOD

"For reasons beyond my comprehension," Kristof writes, "one of my coworkers has managed to keep his job after more than eighteen months of messing about. His latest project was to build an import feature in the admin module of our web application. The idea behind the feature was that the administrators could upload a tab-delimited text file containing a list of products, and the application would insert or update the products in the database."

Some time ago when Michael was tasked with updating some of code on an old website, one file on the server caught his eye.

We've all been there before. You spend all this time building a kick-ass, ultra-awesome, super-sweet web application and then you realize you need to build some stupid "administration" module that needs to do the boring, run-of-the-mill things like maintain users, groups, privileges, and so on.

"I was put on a new Microsoft Access project recently," Stuart A writes, "and I've slowly been finding my way around the system as the need arises (read: as bugs are reported). As my eyes drifted over the numerous modules, one stopped me in my tracks. It was a module named 'modHmm'. I guessed the programmer was in a ponderous mood?. So naturally, I had a look inside..."

Ryan Thompson works on a project where all database queries had to go through "stored procedures". Now before you call me out on extraneous quotes or wonder, so what's wrong with stored procedures?, I'm not talking about those kind of stored procedures. I'm talking about "stored procedures" — i.e., the technique developed by Ryan's predecessors for the ease of maintenance.

Turns out that I'm The Real WTF, since the Code SOD from earlier today was already posted... last week. Whoops; consequences of posting realllly late at night in a hotel room while at The Business of Software conference I suppose. Anyway, here's one that I'm pretty sure wasn't from last week.

"After nearly eight years working as a C++ developer," Rik V writes, "a certain coworker of mine was finally laid off. One of his jobs was to run an application that he wrote which would compare two directories and put any files that had changed into a third. This was a semi-frequent task, and one that he needed to devote quite a bit of time to each month. On his departure, the task fell to me."

"A certain coworker of mine likes to do everything in SQL," Christoffer Hoel writes, "and I mean everything."

"It took months of low quality, late delivered code," Scott C writes, "but a certain coder on our team was finally let go."