The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Unique Emails

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-09-10

Once upon a time, a company started a large React application. Like so many such projects, the requirements were vague and poorly understood, the management didn't have any sort of plan, and the developers didn't understand the framework. Once this inevitably started to go off the rails, all the developers were fired and then contractors were brought in, because that would be "cheaper".

Spoilers: it was not. So all the contractors were fired, and a new round of hires were brought in. This time, though, they'd correct their mistakes by strictly enforcing Scrum practices to be "agile".

16 comments - Last comment @ 12:20

Take a Line Break

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-09-09

The number of web applications which need to generate PDFs is too damn high, in my experience. But it's a requirement which continues to exist for a variety of reasons, so we just have to accept it.

Derek was accepting of it, at least until he found this attempt to add ten lines of space between paragraphs.

13 comments - Last comment @ 07:00

Home By Another Way

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2024-09-06

This week, we discover an answer to the question that has eternally plagued us: "is time travel possible?" I won't swear it's the right answer, but it's definitely an answer.

But first, Faroguy Chris P. both shared the same issue with us (if they are in fact different people and not just each other's sock puppet) Snarked one of them: "A previous Teams "What's New" pop-up was empty. At least this one has content, even if part of it is a broken image and visible header name."

9 comments - Last comment @ 2024-09-09

Strings go Asplodey

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-09-05

Anton has the joy of doing PHP work using one of the more popular e-commerce platforms.

Now, say what you will about PHP, its absolute mess of a root namespace has a function or class for just about everything. You want to split a string? We call that explode because that's way more radical than split. Want to join a string back together? We use implode, because that's the opposite of explode.

31 comments - Last comment @ 2024-09-09

Lowering the Rent Floor

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2024-09-04

Things weren't looking good for IniOil. It was the 1980s in the US: greed was good, anti-trust laws had been literally Borked, and financialization and mergers were eating up the energy industry. IniOil was a small fish surrounded by much larger fish, and the larger fish were hungry.

Gordon was their primary IT person. He managed a farm of VAXes and other minicomputers, which geologists used to do complicated models to predict where oil might be found. In terms of utilization, the computer room was arguably the most efficient space in the company: those computers may have been expensive, but they were burning 24/7 to find more oil to extract.

28 comments - Last comment @ 07:23

Testing the Juniors

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2024-09-03

Stefan S has recently joined the ranks of software developers, having taken on his first job as a junior developer. After a few months of on-boarding with Terry, another new developer, they're now both actually getting assigned real work on tickets that deliver new functionality.

Stefan proudly pushed his first feature, complete with plenty of unit, functional, and end-to-end tests. After a little brushing up during code-review, it was merged along with a few "atta boys", and Stefan was feeling pretty good about himself.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2024-09-04

Classic WTF: A Systematic Approach

by Jake Vinson in Best of… on 2024-09-02

It's a holiday in the US today, where we celebrate labor and laborers. Enjoy a story of working smarter, not harder, to meet unrealistic deadlines and create a lot more work for someone in the future. Original --Remy

It was the early 1990s and Frank was living the dream – unshaven, in pajama bottoms and his favorite hockey jersey, having just woken up at 12:18 PM, was now working in the dim light of his basement on one of his freelance projects. Just as he was sipping a cup of coffee, the phone rang.

Frank tried fruitlessly to fight an unexpected open-mouthed yawn when he picked up the receiver. "OOOOAAAaaahhhh... hello?"

6 comments - Last comment @ 2024-09-04

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