The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

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by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-20

There are real advantages to taking a functional programming approach to expressing problems. Well, some problems, anyway.

Kevin sends us this example of elegant, beautiful functional code in C#:

18 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-21

The Right Helper

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-19

Greg was fighting with an academic CMS, and discovered that a file called write_helper.js was included on every page. It contained this single function:

function document_write(s)
{
   document.write(s);
}

10 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-20

The Mask Service

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-18

Gretchen saw this line in the front-end code for their website and freaked out:

let bucket = new AWS.S3({ params: { Bucket: 'initech-logos' } });

13 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-19

Double Checking

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-13

Abdoullah sends us this little blob of C#, which maybe isn't a full-on WTF, but certainly made me chuckle.

if (file!= null)
{
  if (file.name.StartsWith(userName))
  {
    if (file.name.StartsWith(userName))
    {
      url = string.Format(FILE_LINK, file.itemId, file.name);
      break;
    }
  }
}

21 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-14

Finally, a Null

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-12

Eric writes:

Yes, we actually do have code reviews and testing practices. A version of this code was tested successfully prior to this version being merged in, somehow.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-13

On Deep Background

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-10

Andrew worked with Stuart. Stuart was one of those developers who didn't talk to anyone except to complain about how stupid management was, or how stupid the other developers were. Stuart was also the kind of person who would suddenly go on a tear, write three thousand lines of code in an evening, and then submit an pull request. He wouldn't respond to PR comments, however, and just wait until management needed the feature merged badly enough that someone said, "just approve it so we can move on."

int iDisplayFlags = objectProps.DisplayInfo.BackgroundPrintFlags;

bool bForceBackgroundOn = false;
bool bForceBackgroundOff = false;

// Can't use _displayTypeID because it will always be 21 since text displays as image
if (_fileTypeID == 11) // TEXT
{
    if ((iDisplayFlags & 0x1008) != 0) // Text Background is required
    {
        bForceBackgroundOn = true;
    }
    else if ((iDisplayFlags & 0x1001) != 0) // Text Background is not available
    {
        bForceBackgroundOff = true;
    }
}
else if (_displayTypeID == 21) // IMAGE
{
    if ((iDisplayFlags & 0x1200) != 0) // Image Background is required
    {
        bForceBackgroundOn = true;
    }
    else if ((iDisplayFlags & 0x1040) != 0) // Image Background is not available
    {
        bForceBackgroundOff = true;
    }
}

bool useBackground = bForceBackgroundOn;

// If an object does not have an Background and we try to use it, bad things happen.
// So we check to see if we really have an Background, if not we don't want to try and use it
if (!useBackground && objectProps.DisplayInfo.Background)
{
    useBackground = Convert.ToBoolean(BackgroundShown);
}

if (bForceBackgroundOff)
{
    useBackground = false;
}

19 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-12

Not Exactly Gems

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-06

Sammy's company "jumped on the Ruby on Rails bandwagon since there was one on which to jump", and are still very much a Rails shop. The company has been around for thirty years, and in that time has seen plenty of ups and downs. During one of those "ups", management decided they needed to scale up, both in terms of staffing and in terms of client base- so they hired an offshore team to promote international business and add to their staffing.

A "down" followed not long after, and the offshore team was disbanded. So Sammy inherited the code.

13 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-11

Device Detection

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-04

There are a lot of cases where the submission is "this was server side generated JavaScript and they were loading constants". Which, honestly, is a WTF, but it isn't interesting code. Things like this:

if (false === true)
{
	// do stuff
}

23 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-12

No Limits on Repetition

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-03

Just because you get fired doesn't mean that your pull requests are automatically closed. Dallin was in the middle of reviewing a PR by Steve when the email came out announcing that Steve no longer worked at the company.

Let's take a look at that PR, and maybe we can see why.

8 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-05

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