The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Contains Some Bad Choices

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-02-18

While I'm not hugely fond of ORMs (I'd argue that relations and objects don't map neatly to each other, and any ORM is going to be a very leaky abstraction for all but trivial cases), that's not because I love writing SQL. I'm a big fan of query-builder tools; describe your query programatically, and have an API that generates the required SQL as a result. This cuts down on developer error, and also hopefully handles all the weird little dialects that every database has.

For example, did you know Postgres has an @> operator? It's a contains operation, which returns true if an array, range, or JSON dictionary contains your search term. Basically, an advanced "in" operation.

9 comments - Last comment @ 09:54

Waiting for October

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-02-17

Arguably, the worst moment for date times was the shift from Julian to Gregorian calendars. The upgrade took a long time, too, as some countries were using the Julian calendar over 300 years from the official changeover, famously featured in the likely aprochryphal story about Russia arriving late for the Olympics.

At least that change didn't involve adding any extra months, unlike some of the Julian reforms, which involved adding multiple "intercalary months" to get the year back in sync after missing a pile of leap years.

25 comments - Last comment @ 13:06

C+=0.25

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-02-16

A good C programmer can write C in any language, especially C++. A bad C programmer can do the same, and a bad C programmer will do all sorts of terrifying things in the process.

Gaetan works with a terrible C programmer.

11 comments - Last comment @ 2026-02-17

Consistently Transactional

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-02-12

It's always good to think through how any given database operation behaves inside of a transaction. For example, Faroguy inherited a Ruby codebase which was mostly db.execute("SOME SQL") without any transactions at all. This caused all sorts of problems with half-finished operations polluting the database.

Imagine Faroguy's excitement upon discovering a function called db_trans getting called in a few places. Well, one place, but that's better than none at all. This clearly must mean that at least one operation was running inside of a transaction, right?

12 comments - Last comment @ 2026-02-16

Cover Up

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-02-11

Goodhart's Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Or, more to the point: you get what you measure.

If, for example, you measure code coverage, you are going to get code coverage. It doesn't mean the tests will be any good, it just means that you'll write tests that exercise different blocks of code.

9 comments - Last comment @ 2026-02-11

One Version of Events

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2026-02-10

Jon supports some software that's been around long enough that the first versions of the software ran on, and I quote, "homegrown OS". They've long since migrated to Linux, and in the process much of their software remained the same. Many of the libraries that make up their application haven't been touched in decades. Because of this, they don't really think too much about how they version libraries; when they deploy they always deploy the file as mylib.so.1.0. Their RPM post-install scriptlet does an ldconfig after each deployment to get the symlinks updated.

For those not deep into Linux library management, a brief translation: shared libraries in Linux are .so files. ldconfig is a library manager, which finds the "correct" versions of the libraries you have installed and creates symbolic links to standard locations, so that applications which depend on those libraries can load them.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2026-02-12

Invalid Passport

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-02-09

Gretchen wanted to, in development, disable password authentication. Just for a minute, while she was testing things. That's when she found this approach to handling authentication.

passport.authenticate('local', { session: true }, async (err, user) => {
  if (err) {
    res.send({ success: false, message: 'Error authenticating user.' })
  } else if (!user) {
    User.query()
      .where({ username: req.body.username })
      .first()
      .then(targetUser => {
        if (targetUser) {
          const hash = User.hashPassword(
            targetUser.password_salt,
            req.body.password
          )
          if (hash === targetUser.password_hash) {
            res.send({
              success: false,
              message: 'Incorrect username or password.',
            })
          } else {
            res.send({
              success: false,
              message: 'Incorrect username or password.',
            })
          }
        } else {
          res.send({
            success: false,
            message: 'Incorrect username or password.',
          })
        }
      })
      .catch(err => {
        res.send({ success: false, message: 'Internal server error' })
      })
  } else if (user.firstLogin) {
//......
  }
})(req, res, next);

12 comments - Last comment @ 2026-02-12

Brillant Python Programmers

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-02-05

Sandra from InitAg (previously) tries to keep the team's code quality up. The team she's on uses CI, code reviews, linting and type checking, and most important: hiring qualified people. Overall, the team's been successful recently. Recently.

The company got its start doing data-science, which meant much of the initial code was written by brilliant PhDs who didn't know the first thing about writing software. Most of that code has been retired, but it is impossible to dispatch all of it.

13 comments - Last comment @ 2026-02-09