The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

A Unique Mistake

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2025-10-08

Henrik spent too many hours, staring at the bug, trying to understand why the 3rd party service they were interacting with wasn't behaving the way he expected. Henrik would send updates, and then try and read back the results, and the changes didn't happen. Except sometimes they did. Reads would be inconsistent. It'd work fine for weeks, and then suddenly things would go off the rails, showing values that no one from Henrik's company had put in the database.

The vendor said, "This is a problem on your side, clearly." Henrik disagreed.

6 comments - Last comment @ 13:49

Listing Off the Problems

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2025-10-07

Today, Mike sends us a Java Representative Line that is, well, very representative. The line itself isn't inherently a WTF, but it points to WTFs behind it. It's an omen of WTFs, a harbinger.

ArrayList[] data = new ArrayList[dataList.size()];

6 comments - Last comment @ 02:34

A Monthly Addition

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-10-06

In the ancient times of the late 90s, Bert worked for a software solutions company. It was the kind of company that other companies hired to do software for them, releasing custom applications for each client. Well, "each" client implies more than one client, but in this company's case, they only had one reliable client.

One day, the client said, "Hey, we have an application we built to handle scheduling helpdesk workers. Can you take a look at it and fix some problems we've got?" Bert's employer said, "Sure, no problem."

12 comments - Last comment @ 2025-10-07

Neither Here nor There

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-10-03

... or maybe I should have said both here and there?

The Beast in Black has an equivocal fuel system. "Apparently, the propane level in my storage tank just went quantum, and even the act of observing the level has not collapsed the superposition of more propane and less propane. I KNEW that the Copenhagen Interpretation couldn't be objectively correct."

5 comments - Last comment @ 2025-10-05

Tic Tac Whoa

by Remy Porter in Tales from the Interview on 2025-10-02

Usually, when we have a "Tales from the Interview" we're focused on bad interviewing practices. Today, we're mixing up a "Tales" with a CodeSOD.

Today's Anonymous submitter does tech screens at their company. Like most companies do, they give the candidate a simple toy problem, and ask them to solve it. The goal here is not to get the greatest code, but as our submitter puts it, "weed out the jokers".

22 comments - Last comment @ 2025-10-03

Property Flippers

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-10-01

Kleyguerth was having a hard time tracking down a bug. A _hasPicked flag was "magically" toggling itself to on. It was a bug introduced in a recent commit, but the commit in question was thousands of lines, and had the helpful comment "Fixed some stuff during the tests".

In several places, the TypeScript code checks a property like so:

21 comments - Last comment @ 11:39

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