The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

One Size Fits All

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2019-08-23

"Multi-platform AND multi-gender! Who knew SSDs could be so accomodating?" Felipe C. wrote.

6 comments - Last comment @ 08:58

Keeping Busy

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2019-08-22

In 1979, Argle was 18, happy to be working at a large firm specializing in aerospace equipment. There was plenty of opportunity to work with interesting technology and learn from dozens of more senior programs—well, usually. But then came the day when Argle's boss summoned him to his cube for something rather different.

43 comments - Last comment @ 08:55

Unstrung Manager

by Remy Porter in Coded Smorgasbord on 2019-08-21

Deon was on a contract-to-hire job. In the beginning, it sounded like a good job. Then he looked at the C# codebase. It didn’t take him long to decide that this wasn’t going to be a job he’d work at full time. Still, he’d be happy to continue contracting, because it was quite obvious that it would be a lot of billable hours.

How many is “a lot”? Well, let’s talk about their StringManager class. A common WTF is a “god” class that does a thousand different things. Here’s a class made up of nothing but static functions which is 1800 lines long. This wasn’t assembled by a junior developer or an intern, but their senior technical lead, who was adamant that this was the right way to program, and god damn anybody who said otherwise.

39 comments - Last comment @ 08:54

I'm Sooooooo Random, LOL

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-08-20

There are some blocks of code that require a preamble, and an explanation of the code and its flow. Often you need to provide some broader context.

Sometimes, you get some code like Wolf found, which needs no explanation:

30 comments - Last comment @ 09:04

Lowest Bidder Squared

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2019-08-19

Initech was in dire straits. The website was dog slow, and the budget had been exceeded by a factor of five already trying to fix it. Korbin, today's submitter, was brought in to help in exchange for decent pay and an office in their facility.

31 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-21

What About the Fish?

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2019-08-16

"On the one hand, I don't want to know what the fish has to do with Boris Johnson's love life...but on the other hand I have to know!" Mark R. writes.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-20

A Devil With a Date

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-08-15

Jim was adding a feature to the backend. This feature updated a few fields on an object, and then handed the object off as JSON to the front-end.

Adding the feature seemed pretty simple, but when Jim went to check out its behavior in the front-end, he got validation errors. Something in the data getting passed back by his web service was fighting with the front end.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-18

A Loop in the String

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-08-14

Robert was browsing through a little JavaScript used at his organization, and found this gem of type conversion.

//use only for small numbers
function StringToInteger (str) {
    var int = -1;
    for (var i=0; i<=100; i++) {
        if (i+"" == str) {
            int = i;
            break;
        }
    }
    return int;
}

38 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-18