The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Butting In

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-09-30

Initech is a large, international corporation. Any time you're doing business at a global scale, you're going to need to contend with a language barrier sooner or later. This makes employees who are multilingual valuable.

Dana recently joined Initech, and in the first week, was warned about Jerry. Jerry was the "chief" "architect" and team "lead", and was one of those special, valuable employees who spoke three languages. Correction, "spoke" needs scare quotes too, because Jerry was incomprehensible in every language he spoke, including his native tongue.

31 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-08

Trim Off a Few Miles

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-09-26

I don’t know the length of Russell F’s commute. Presumably, the distance is measured in miles. Miles and miles. I say that, because of this block, which is written… with care.

  string Miles_w_Care = InvItem.MilesGuaranteeFlag == true && InvItem.Miles_w_Care.HasValue ? (((int)InvItem.Miles_w_Care / 1000).ToString().Length > 2 ? ((int)InvItem.Miles_w_Care / 1000).ToString().Trim().Substring(0, 2) : ((int)InvItem.Miles_w_Care / 1000).ToString().Trim()) : "  ";
  string Miles_wo_Care = InvItem.MilesGuaranteeFlag == true && InvItem.Miles_wo_Care.HasValue ? (((int)InvItem.Miles_wo_Care / 1000).ToString().Length > 2 ? ((int)InvItem.Miles_wo_Care / 1000).ToString().Trim().Substring(0, 2) : ((int)InvItem.Miles_wo_Care / 1000).ToString().Trim()) : "  ";

27 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-07

And it was Uphill Both Ways

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-09-25

Today’s submission is a little bit different. Kevin sends us some code where the real WTF is simply that… it still is in use somewhere. By the standards of its era, I’d actually say that the code is almost good. This is more of a little trip down memory lane, about the way web development used to work.

Let’s start with the HTML snippet:

26 comments - Last comment @ 2022-11-20

Do You Need this

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-09-24

I’ve written an unfortunate amount of “useless” code in my career. In my personal experience, that’s code where I write it for a good reason at the time- like it’s a user request for a feature- but it turns out nobody actually needed or wanted that feature. Or, perhaps, if I’m being naughty, it’s a feature I want to implement just for the sake of doing it, not because anybody asked for it.

The code’s useless because it never actually gets used.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2019-09-28

You Can Take Care

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-09-18

Tiberrias sends us some code that, on its face, without any context, doesn’t look bad.

var conditionId = _monitorConditionManagement.GetActiveConditionCountByClient(clientIdentityNumber);

_monitorConditionManagement.StopCondition(conditionId);

27 comments - Last comment @ 2019-09-30

Should I Do this? Depends.

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-09-16

One of the key differences between a true WTF and an ugly hack is a degree of self-awareness. It's not a WTF if you know it's a WTF. If you've been doing this job for a non-zero amount of time, you have had a moment where you have a solution, and you know it's wrong, you know you shouldn't do this, but by the gods, it works and you've got more important stuff to worry about right now, so you just do it.

An anonymous submitter committed a sin, and has reached out to us for absolution.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-23

Time to Wait

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-09-12

When dealing with customers- and here, we mean, “off the street” customers- they often want to know “how long am I going to have to wait?” Whether we’re talking about a restaurant, a mechanic, a doctor’s office, or a computer/phone repair shop, knowing (and sharing with our customers) reasonable expectations about how much time they’re about to spend waiting.

Russell F works on an application which facilitates this sort of customer-facing management. It does much more, too, obviously, but one of its lesser features is to estimate how long a customer is about to spend waiting.

35 comments - Last comment @ 2021-01-17

ImAlNumb?

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-09-11

I think it’s fair to say that C, as a language, has never had a particularly great story for working with text. Individual characters are okay, but strings are a nightmare. The need to support unicode has only made that story a little more fraught, especially as older code now suddenly needs to support extended characters. And by “older” I mean, “wchar was added in 1995, which is practically yesterday in C time”.

Lexie inherited some older code. It was not designed to support unicode, which is certainly a problem in 2019, and it’s the problem Lexie was tasked with fixing. But it had an… interesting approach to deciding if a character was alphanumeric.

42 comments - Last comment @ 2020-10-20

Making a Nest

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-09-09

Tiffany started the code review with an apology. "I only did this to stay in style with the existing code, because it's either that or we rewrite the whole thing from scratch."

Jim J, who was running the code review nodded. Before Tiffany, this application had been designed from the ground up by Armando. Armando had gone to a tech conference, and learned about F#, and how all those exciting functional features were available in C#, and returned jabbering about "immutable data" and "functors" and "metaprogramming" and decided that he was now a functional programmer, who just happened to work in C#.

32 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-25

Give Your Date a Workout

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-09-05

Bob E inherited a site which helps amateur sports clubs plan their recurring workouts/practices during the season. To do this, given the start date of the season, and the number of weeks, it needs to figure out all of the days in that range.

function GenWorkoutDates()
{

   global $SeasonStartDate, $WorkoutDate, $WeeksInSeason;

   $TempDate = explode("/", $SeasonStartDate);

   for ($i = 1; $i <= $WeeksInSeason; $i++)
   {
     for ($j = 1; $j <= 7; $j++)
     {

	   $MonthName = substr("JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec", $TempDate[0] * 3 - 3, 3);

       $WorkoutDate[$i][$j] = $MonthName . " " . $TempDate[1] . "  ";
       $TempDate[1] += 1;


       switch ( $TempDate[0] )
	   {
     case 9:
	   case 4:
	   case 6:
	   case 11:
	     $DaysInMonth = 30;
	     break;

	   case 2:
     	 $DaysInMonth = 28;

	     switch ( $TempDate[2] )
	     {
	     case 2012:
	     case 2016:
	     case 2020:
	     	$DaysInMonth = 29;
	        break;

	     default:
	       $DaysInMonth = 28;
	       break;
	     }

	     break;

	   default:
	     $DaysInMonth = 31;
	     break;
	   }

	   if ($TempDate[1] > $DaysInMonth)
	   {
	     $TempDate[1] = 1;
	     $TempDate[0] += 1;
	     if ($TempDate[0] > 12)
	     {
	       $TempDate[0] = 1;
	       $TempDate[2] += 1;
	     }
	   }
     }
   }
}

42 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-23

UnINTentional Errors

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-09-04

Data type conversions are one of those areas where we have rich, well-supported, well-documented features built into most languages. Thus, we also have endless attempts for people to re-implement them. Or worse, wrap a built-in method in a way which makes everything less clear.

Mindy encountered this.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2019-09-06

Boxing with the InTern

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-09-03

A few years ago, Naomi did an internship with Initech. Before her first day, she was very clear on what her responsibilities would be: she'd be on a team modernizing an older product called "Gem" (no relation to Ruby libraries).

By the time her first day rolled around, however, Initech had new priorities. There were a collection of fires on some hyperspecific internal enterprise tool, and everyone was running around and screaming about the apocalypse while dealing with that. Except Naomi, because nobody had any time to bring the intern up to speed on this disaster. Instead, she was given a new priority: just maintain Gem. And no, she wouldn't have a mentor. For the next six months, Naomi was the Gem support team.

31 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-11