Recent Articles

Aug 2026

Tales from the World Cup

by in Feature Articles on

All I can say in response to our anonymous submitter's story is, ALMOST?!

With the World Cup being hosted in North America this year, I remembered this story that happened back in 2014. At the time I was working in Brazil, for a company that builds software systems for public services. And, with the World Cup being hosted there, in came the opportunity for local agencies to invest in modernization, with pretty much a blank check to get new services, so long as it was deployed before the end of the World Cup. And so the sales people did what they did best, and went around trying to upsell whoever would be willing to buy — no matter our actual capacity for developing the things.

5 comments - Last comment @ 13:33

Hello, New Mexico!

by in Error'd on

Peter G. shared with us yet another ordering bungled example of. "Should really say "please engage in an Easter egg hunt to find your language"."

3ccdf44218264528b28550518f7d6aea

21 comments - Last comment @ 12:37

The Big Family

by in CodeSOD on

Some time ago, Charles shared with us some awful PHP, aka the most common sort. Today's code sample is maybe a little too big to sum up, but I'll let Charles take a crack at it.

It's so bad that even analyzing and laughing at it feels impossible. But it’s so bad, I couldn’t not share it.

20 comments - Last comment @ 18:12

Lock 'Em Dead

by in CodeSOD on

Kevin sends us an exception handler from C++. Let's see if we can spot what's going wrong:

catch (Exception::Deadlock)
{
   retry;
}
25 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-30

Both Ways Bug Me

by in Representative Line on

There are many cases where some sort of debugging block sneaks by, especially cases where we see preprocessors or templates working, which leave us with nonsense like if (true == false) running in production. But Codemonkey found a new twist on that sort of thing, in a SQL query being run in production.

WHERE (some conditions) AND (1 = 0 OR (1 = 1 AND (other conditions)))
9 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-29

RCE As a Feature

by in Feature Articles on

The opposite of meritocracy is kakistocracy: the worst and least-qualified are the ones who rise to the top.

Get real familiar with that word, dear readers. I think you'll need it.

9 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-25

Failure, After Failure, After Failure...

by in Error'd on

We have a couple from Foo (AKA Foo) today, include a special text copy-paste

Foo shared "I know you usually post image WTFs here, but here's a text output from chromium:

6 comments - Last comment @ 09:49

We All Register This

by in Representative Line on

Today's maybe more of a "representative data sheet entry" than anything else.

Every developer has the experience of reading the documentation. If you've been at this for some time, you've probably read bad documentation. Documentation that is incomplete, inaccurate, or otherwise flawed. Or, my personal favorite, the brief time where Oracle tried to put all of its documentation into an Adobe Flex site (aka, a Flash application, not a real web app). That one had fun bonus features, like "breaking copy and paste" and "preventing you from deep linking to a piece of the documentation".

23 comments - Last comment @ 06:09

Back to the Lab

by in CodeSOD on

Matlab is special. Scientists and researchers love it. Programmers hate it, and not just because it uses 1-based arrays. I've worked on a number of projects where the task was "take this Matlab code and convert it to C so we can run it on an embedded CPU". Somehow, in that process, I've avoided learning much about Matlab.

Andre works on a team that uses Matlab to manage experimental scenarios. They wanted to do a simple task: generate a set of participant-specific images, store them in a database, and reference them later. Somewhere in the intersection of the database product they were using, the Matlab license they had, and other constraints, they discovered that there simply was no good way to do this.

9 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-20

Floating Along

by in Feature Articles on

Today's submitter John F. was migrating data from a Microsoft platform to a Microsoft platform, using Microsoft tools. Absolutely nothing could go wrong, right?

Right?

26 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-26

The State of Ticketing

by in Feature Articles on

Developing software can't simply be done with a text editor and a compiler. There are a variety of other tools we have to bring to bear that support our efforts and keep the team organized, like say, source control.

There are certain tools we all have to use that I would argue, nobody has actually make a version that's any good. Build tooling is one of my go-to examples: there are no good build systems, only build systems that are good enough for this task.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-22

Zero to Zero in 0 seconds

by in Error'd on

"So many zeroes! I'm in." W00H000! Kivi S. "found this ad in the wild. This must be a very large jackpot, look at all those zeroes!"

9bc39202c0254a468b610e65a50c4ab6

10 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-17

Never Eating the Cookie

by in CodeSOD on

Maciej works as a freelancer, and that frequently means picking up old PHP code that nobody wants to support.

One project had been lingering for ages with key features missing. Specifically, it was supposed to make HTTP requests to other services on an interval, and use that to populate its data. "The old dev tried, but never got it working." It was Maciej's turn to give it a shot.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-24

Branching Paths

by in Feature Articles on

"You submitted a pull request."

Indika was, in fact, reviewing the comments she'd gotten on that very same pull request, when her boss, Bill, walked up behind her. What she didn't understand is why Bill said it like it was an accusation.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-14

Public Private Partnership

by in CodeSOD on

Eric O was trawling through an API for handling concurrency, and found this little mismatch between the comment and the definition:

/// <summary>
/// private Status, because while this object needs to be able to set the status, consumers should only be able to check it, lest everything break.
/// </summary>
public StatusType Status {
    get {
        return _status;
    }
    set {
        if (value != _status) {
            RaisePropertyChanged("Status");
        }
    }
}
13 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-13

The Crossroads

by in Feature Articles on
I moved some things around on my calendar. 4:00 PM today is open. Please come to the executive floor.

-Leila

11 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-28

Time Wounds All Heels

by in Error'd on

Looked to the past for some time-traveling entries to round out a themed post. They're 25% fresh.

Robert apparently got a notification of a planned past delivery. It could be just a case of two systems that don't report different time zones, but even so, that's a wtf. Says he: "I just received an email from OnePlus this morning letting me know they have updated the planned delivery date for my order to Yesterday. I guess the delivery driver is going to time travel to get there on time since it still hasn't arrived. "

15 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-13

A More Civilized Age

by in Feature Articles on

Greta (previously) sends us more updates from her "Ancient Development Environment".

An important task an IDE must do is report build errors to its users. Arguably, that's one of the most important parts. I wouldn't know, I insist on building from the CLI all the time, because IDEs confuse and frighten me. I recognize I'm the weird one here, who is more comfortable in GDB than in a GUI debugger, but this isn't about me, it's about the IDE Greta is using.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-18

Connection State

by in CodeSOD on

Frederick A sends us a bit of null checking code, and offers us a better solution.

class ConferenceService
{
	/// <summary>
	/// Checks if conference is active
	/// </summary>
	public bool IsCalling()
	{
		try
		{
			return m_ConnectionService.Core.State.IsWebRTCConnected;
		}
		catch
		{
			return false;
		}
	}
}
11 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-11

Always Take the Option

by in CodeSOD on

Frequent submitter Capybara James sends us this simple snippet, which highlights that even when you have the lovely convenience of Optional types, you can use them wrong.

if (StringUtils.hasLength(dto.getAssetModelUUID())
		// Other conditions
		) {
	return Optional.ofNullable(dto);
}
8 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-11

Lose Some Padding

by in Feature Articles on

Flat-file style databases were designed to fit the constraints of the systems they were running on. You specify your schema in terms of "how many characters in a file we use to store this data", meaning something like this: JOHN    SMITH    12343rd    StAnytown PA12345 is read in my knowing that the first name field is 8 characters wide, the last name field is 8 characters wide, the street number is 4 digits, and so on.

It's also a terrible schema, and woe to anyone with a long name. But many a mainframe had a similar schema.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-04
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