The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Let's Be Facebook!

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2026-06-01

The real WTF is that our long-time friend and submitter Argle failed to dissuade all three of his sons from pursuing IT careers of their own:

Back circa 2012, my three sons all got jobs at a company that had a brilliant web project. So brilliant that it had the support of a Disney VP, the mayor of the city, and other VIPs. At one point, my sons asked to borrow money to invest in the project. They are good boys (one is now a senior developer with Proctor & Gamble), so I backed them.

20 comments - Last comment @ 16:16

Super SEO Strategies

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2026-05-29

It's ironic -- this site gets absolutely inundated with blogspam from people trying to improve their SEO ranking, and yet the only requirement to get your website linked is one dumb little typo in the right menu.

Faithful Michael R. is still job hunting, now even farther afield. "I shall try the gigs in United Kingsom. https://electronicmusicopenmic.com/"

24 comments - Last comment @ 14:14

What Condition is This

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-05-28

Untodesu sends us this submission, with this comment:

Literally no idea what kind of drugs the guy was taking but nonetheless we've rewritten it to be just a two-liner

13 comments - Last comment @ 2026-05-29

Are There Files Yet?

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-05-27

Are there any files to send? That's the question that Chris C's predecessor had. So they asked it. Again. And again. And again.

Chris writes:

16 comments - Last comment @ 2026-05-28

Whales Ahoy!

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2026-05-26

The waters are even more dangerous than we imagined. Have a look at some of the crazed whales our brave submitters and commenters have encountered in the wild.

First comes an Anonymous tale of woe:

10 comments - Last comment @ 2026-05-29

Classic WTF: One-and-a-Half-Tiered Application Design

by Jake Vinson in CodeSOD on 2026-05-25

It's a holiday in the US today, so we're reaching back into the archives. What we really need is a single function that can do it all, and by "it" we mean "ruin your life." Original --Remy

There are several types of bad code; there's lazy code, frantic code, unaware-of-a-better-way code, and aware-of-a-better-way-but-too-apathetic-to-do-it code, to name a few. Then there're amalgamations of different types of bad code.

Môshe encountered such an amalgam when his company was trying out a new delivery service. Môshe spent some time evaluating the IE-only web interface, and was curious about some JavaScript errors he was getting. Strangely, he noticed variables named dateSQL, newSQLTag, and modeSQL.

7 comments - Last comment @ 2026-05-31

April is Special, and so are you

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2026-05-22

"April is special," writes Elwin. It is, but take heart May, every month is special at TDWTF.

12 comments - Last comment @ 2026-05-25

In the Know

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-05-21

Delilah works in a Python shop. Despite Python's "batteries included" design, that doesn't stop people from trying to make their own batteries from potatoes. For example, her co-worker wrote this function:

def key_exists(element, key):
    if isinstance(element, dict):
        try:
            element = element[key]
        except KeyError:
            return False
        return True

7 comments - Last comment @ 2026-05-26