The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Christmas in the Server Room III: The Search for Santa

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2025-12-25

How many times does it take to make something a tradition? Well, this is our third installment of Christmas in the Server Room, which seems pretty traditional at this point. Someday we'll run out of Christmas movies that I've watched, and then I'll need to start watching them intentionally. I'm dreading having to sit through some adaptation of the Christmas Shoes or whatever.

In any case, we're going to rate Christmas movies on their accuracy of representing the experience of IT workers. One 💾 grants it the realism of that movie where Adam Sandler fights Pac-Man, while 💾💾💾💾💾 tells us that it's as realistic as an instructional video about the Turbo-Encabulator.

Home Alone

9 comments - Last comment @ 13:32

Holiday Party

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2025-12-24

The holiday season is an opportunity for employers to show their appreciation for their staff. Lavish parties, extra time off, whatever. Even some of the worst employers I've had could put together a decent Christmas party.

But that doesn't mean they all go right.

10 comments - Last comment @ 16:05

A Case of Old Code

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-12-23

We've talked about the For-Case anti-pattern many, many times. And while we've seen some wild variations, and some pretty hideous versions, I think we have yet to see the exact example Ashley H sends us:

for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++) {
    if (i == 0) {
        step1();
    } else if (i == 1) {
        step2();
    } else if (i == 2) {
        step3();
    } else if (i == 3){
        finalStep();
    }
}

24 comments - Last comment @ 2025-12-24

Linguistic Perls

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-12-18

A long time ago, Joey made some extra bucks doing technical support for the neighbors. It was usually easy work, and honestly was more about being a member of the community than anything else.

This meant Joey got to spend time with Ernest. Ernest was a retiree with a professorial manner, complete with horn-rimmed glasses and a sweater vest. Ernest volunteered at the local church, was known for his daily walks around the neighborhood, and was a generally beloved older neighbor.

35 comments - Last comment @ 2025-12-23

The Spare Drive

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2025-12-17

As the single-digit Fahrenheit temperatures creep across the northeast United States, one's mind drifts off to holidays- specifically summer holidays where it isn't so cold that it hurts to breathe.

Luciano M works in Italy, where August 15th is a national holiday, but also August is the traditional time of year for everyone to take off, leaving the country mostly shut down for the month.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2025-12-19

Duplicate Reports

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-12-15

Today's anonymous submitter sends us a short snippet. They found this because they were going through code committed by an expensive third-party contractor, trying to track down a bug: every report in the database kept getting duplicated for some reason.

This code has been in production for over a decade, bugs and all:

21 comments - Last comment @ 2025-12-17

Tis the Season(al Release)

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-12-11

We recently asked for some of your holiday horror stories. We'll definitely take more, if you've got them, but we're going to start off with Jessica, who brings us not so much a horror as an omen.

Jessica writes:

28 comments - Last comment @ 2025-12-17

The Article

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-12-09

When writing software, we like our code to be clean, simple, and concise. But that loses something, you end up writing just some code, and not The Code. Mads's co-worker wanted to make his code more definite by using this variable naming convention:

public static void addToListInMap(final Map theMap, final String theKey, final Object theValue) {
	List theList = (List) theMap.get(theKey);
	if (theList == null) {
		theList = new ArrayList();
		theMap.put(theKey, theList);
	}
	theList.add(theValue);
}

28 comments - Last comment @ 2025-12-16