The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

On the Log, Forever

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2024-10-29

Jon recently started a new project. When setting up his dev environment, one of his peers told him, "You can disable verbose logging by setting DEBUG_LOG=false in your config file."

Well, when Jon did that, the verbose logging remained on. When he asked his peers, they were all surprised to see that the flag wasn't turning off debug logging. "Hunh, that used to work. Someone must have changed something…" Everyone had enough new development to do that tracking down a low priority bug fell to Jon. It didn't take long.

0 comments - Last comment @ -none-

Trophy Bug Hunting

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-28

Quality control is an important business function for any company. When your company is shipping devices with safety concerns, it's even more important. In some industries, a quality control failure is bound to be national headlines.

When the quality control software tool stopped working, everyone panicked. At which point, GRH stepped in.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-28

What Goes Around

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2024-10-25

No obvious pattern fell out of last week's submissions for Error'd, but I did especially like Caleb Su's example.

Michael R. , apparently still job hunting, reports "I have signed up to outlier.ai to make some $$$ on the side. No instructions necessary."

7 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-27

Join Our Naming

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-24

As a general rule, if you're using an RDBMS and can solve your problem using SQL, you should solve your problem using SQL. It's how we avoid doing joins or sorts in our application code, which is always a good thing.

But this is a general rule. And Jasmine sends us one where solving the problem as a query was a bad idea.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-25

Querieous Strings

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-23

When processing HTTP requests, you frequently need to check the parameters which were sent along with that request. Those parameters are generally passed as stringly-typed key/value pairs. None of this is news to anyone.

What is news, however, is how Brodey's co-worker indexed the key/value pairs.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-24

What the Hmm?

by Remy Porter in Coded Smorgasbord on 2024-10-22

Our stories come from you, our readers- which, it's worth reminding everyone, keep those submissions coming in. There's nothing on this site without your submissions.

Now, we do get some submissions which don't make the page. Frequently, it's simply because we simply don't have enough context from the submission to understand it or comment on it effectively. Often, it's just not that remarkable. And sometimes, it's because the code isn't a WTF at all.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-25

Perfect Test Coverage

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-21

When SC got hired, the manager said "unit testing is very important to us, and we have 100% test coverage."

Well, that didn't sound terrible, and SC was excited to see what kind of practices they used to keep them at that high coverage.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-22

Friday On My Mind

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2024-10-18

The most common type of submission Error'd receives are simple, stupid, data problems on Amazon. The text doesn't match the image, the pricing is goofy, or some other mixup that are just bound to happen with a database of zillions of products uploaded by a plethora of barely-literate mountain village drop-shippers.

So I don't usually feature them, preferring to find something with at least a chance of being a creative new bug.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-21