The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Barren Fields

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-03-24

Today, it's not exactly the code that was bad. For some time, a government agency had been collecting information from users using fillable PDF forms. The user would submit the form, and then a data entry clerk would copy the text from the form into a database. This, of course, raised the question: why was someone manually riding the copy/paste button?

Sally was tasked with automating this. The data is already in a digital format, so it should be easy to use a PDF library to parse out the entered data and insert it into the database. And it almost was.

0 comments - Last comment @ -none-

Completely Readable

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-03-23

It is eminitently reasonable for companies to have "readability standards" for their code. You're writing this code for humans to read, after all, at least in theory. You need to communicate to future inheritors of your code.

But that doesn't mean readability standards are good. Tony's company, for example, has rules about returning boolean values from functions, and those rules mean you are expected to write code like this:

27 comments - Last comment @ 04:22

Poly Means Many, After All

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-03-17

Capybara James sends us some code which is totally designed to be modular.

This particular software accepts many kinds of requests which it then converts into a request for a ListView. This is a perfect example of where to use polymorphism, so you can write one transform method that operates on any kind of request.

3 comments - Last comment @ 2026-03-17

A Little Twisted

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-03-16

Dana sends us a WTF that'll turn your head. She was shopping for new hard drives, and was doing it from her phone, a fairly reasonable tool to use for online shopping these days. She opened the website of one vendor, and it was rotated 90 degrees. Or half-pi radians, for those of us that are more used to sensible units.

This was irrespective of any rotation settings on her phone, the website insisted on showing itself in landscape mode. This created quite the unusual appearance when she held her phone in portrait orientation: the browser chrome surrounding the content was in portrait mode, but the page itself was in landscape.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2026-03-18

Awaiting A Reaction

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-03-12

Today's Anonymous submitter sends us some React code. We'll look at the code and then talk about the WTF:

// inside a function for updating checkboxes on a page
if (!e.target.checked) {
  const removeIndex = await checkedlist.findIndex(
    (sel) => sel.Id == selected.Id,
  )
  const removeRowIndex = await RowValue.findIndex(
    (sel) => sel == Index,
  )

// checkedlist and RowValue are both useState instances.... they should never be modified directly
  await checkedlist.splice(removeIndex, 1)
  await RowValue.splice(removeRowIndex, 1)

// so instead of doing above logic in the set state, they dont
  setCheckedlist(checkedlist)
  setRow(RowValue)
} else {
  if (checkedlist.findIndex((sel) => sel.Id == selected.Id) == -1) {
    await checkedlist.push(selected)
  }
// same, instead of just doing a set state call, we do awaits and self updates
  await RowValue.push(Index)
  setCheckedlist(checkedlist)
  setRow(RowValue)
}

18 comments - Last comment @ 2026-03-13

All Docked Up

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-03-11

Aankhen has a peer who loves writing Python scripts to automate repetitive tasks. We'll call this person Ernest.

Ernest was pretty proud of some helpers he wrote to help him manage his Docker containers. For example, when he wanted to stop and remove all his running Docker containers, he wrote this script:

21 comments - Last comment @ 2026-03-16

To Shutdown You Must First Shutdown

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-03-10

Every once in awhile, we get a bit of terrible code, and our submitter also shares, "this isn't called anywhere," which is good, but also bad. Ernesto sends us a function which is called in only one place:

///
/// Shutdown server
///
private void shutdownServer()
{
    shutdownServer();
}

18 comments - Last comment @ 2026-03-19

Qaudruple Negative

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-03-05

We mostly don't pick on bad SQL queries here, because mostly the query optimizer is going to fix whatever is wrong, and the sad reality is that databases are hard to change once they're running; especially legacy databases. But sometimes the code is just so hamster-bowling-backwards that it's worth looking into.

Jim J has been working on a codebase for about 18 months. It's a big, sprawling, messy project, and it has code like this:

10 comments - Last comment @ 2026-03-06

Repeating Your Existence

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-03-04

Today's snippet from Rich D is short and sweet, and admittedly, not the most TFs of WTFs out there. But it made me chuckle, and sometimes that's all we need. This Java snippet shows us how to delete a file:

if (Files.exists(filePath)) {
    Files.deleteIfExists(filePath);
}

23 comments - Last comment @ 2026-03-18

Blocked Up

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-03-03

Agatha has inherited some Windows Forms code. This particular batch of such code falls into that delightful category of code that's wrong in multiple ways, multiple times. The task here is to disable a few panels worth of controls, based on a condition. Or, since this is in Spanish, "bloquear controles". Let's see how they did it.

private void BloquearControles()
{
	bool bolBloquear = SomeConditionTM; // SomeConditionTM = a bunch of stuff. Replaced for clarity.

	// Some code. Removed for clarity.
	
	// private System.Windows.Forms.Panel pnlPrincipal;
	foreach (Control C in this.pnlPrincipal.Controls)
	{
		if (C.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.TextBox))
		{
			C.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.ComboBox))
		{
			C.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.CheckBox))
		{
			C.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.DateTimePicker))
		{
			C.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.NumericUpDown))
		{
			C.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
	}
	
	// private System.Windows.Forms.GroupBox grpProveedor;
	foreach (Control C1 in this.grpProveedor.Controls)
	{
		if (C1.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.TextBox))
		{
			C1.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C1.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.ComboBox))
		{
			C1.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C1.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.CheckBox))
		{
			C1.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C1.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.DateTimePicker))
		{
			C1.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C1.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.NumericUpDown))
		{
			C1.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
	}

	// private System.Windows.Forms.GroupBox grpDescuentoGeneral;
	foreach (Control C2 in this.grpDescuentoGeneral.Controls)
	{
		if (C2.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.TextBox))
		{
			C2.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C2.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.ComboBox))
		{
			C2.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C2.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.CheckBox))
		{
			C2.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C2.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.DateTimePicker))
		{
			C2.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C2.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.NumericUpDown))
		{
			C2.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
	}

	// Some more code. Removed for clarity.
}

21 comments - Last comment @ 2026-03-10

Popping Off

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-03-02

Python is (in)famous for its "batteries included" approach to a standard library, but it's not that notable that it has plenty of standard data structures, like dicts. Nor is in surprising that dicts have all sorts of useful methods, like pop, which removes a key from the dict and returns its value.

Because you're here, reading this site, you'll also be unsurprised that this doesn't stop developers from re-implementing that built-in function, badly. Karen sends us this:

14 comments - Last comment @ 2026-03-04

Recent CodeSOD