The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

A single line of code from a large application that somehow manages to provide an almost endless insight into the pain that its maintainers face each day.

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.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2024-11-03

Ripping Away the Mask

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2024-10-14

Jason was investigating a bug in a bitmask. It should have been set to 0b11, but someone had set it to just plain decimal 11. The line responsible looked like this:

byte number = (byte) 11;

25 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-17

Try to Catch This

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2024-10-07

The power of exception handling is that it allows every layer in our stack be notified of an error condition, do something about it, and pass it on if necessary.

For example, if you have a data access layer and a query fails, you may catch the exception and potentially retry there, only passing the exception up the stack after a few failures. Or, you may fail to connect, updates some internal status variables to represent that you're in an invalid state, and then pass that exception up the stack.

10 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-08

Recent Representative Line

On the Log, Forever

Ripping Away the Mask

Try to Catch This