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Coyne viewed the coming work week with dread. His employer spent roughly the sum of all the employee’ 401k holdings on a weeklong mandatory communications training course. The problem of no work getting done during training was solved by having mandatory after-hours work to make up for it.
When Maarten first saw the utility function below, he couldn’t imagine why converting a number from float to double required a string intermediate. Fortunately, whoever wrote this code followed best practices: their comment not only explained what the code is doing, it also explained why.
"Ah...it looks like someone is testing in Production as every link on Cleveland.com starts with this helpful alert," James writes.
Depending upon how long you've been in this industry, you've seen your fair share of bad design, bad code and bad users. Darren A. explains his dealings with bad management, and how a string of edicts there-from can crush kill destroy an organization.
In the past, before management decided to, well, manage, Darren's company was able to complete 15-25 major projects each year. Then they hired a new Head of Software Services, who felt that he needed to actively manage all facets of how things were done...
The web team and the JDE development team rarely see eye-to-eye in Cho's company. Cho, the JDE developer, worked in a world full of Oracle databases and important financial records. Andrew, a web developer, worked in a world full of MS-SQL and sales appointments. So when Andrew asked Cho to put together a job that would remove debt records older than six years so they'd stop showing up in his sales reports, he figured she had things well in hand.
Neil’s first contributions to the company codebase were to be tested in the fires of a late afternoon code review. Donavan, a veteran of Java since 1.1, was asked to sit in.
"'Soll das Fenster geschlossen werden?' means roughly 'Should the window be closed?'," wrote David, "Hovering over the 'No' option shows that it will invoke doNothing(). Thank goodness!"
As some readers already know, the Polish government is not on the best of terms with modern technology. We'd be damned, however, if that stopped us from trying- even if the end result is as much of a mess as Michał reports it to be.
Marino was handed this code. Like all great code, it’s written defensively, protecting itself against nulls, empty strings, and other unexpected values.
I mean, sort of.
If you asked the web developers at XYZ Insurance, a mere network engineer like Billy had no business snooping around in their code. “He probably doesn’t even know what HTML stands for,” they’d sneer, and they kept sneering until a routine change to fulfill an audit requirement brought their internal website grinding to a halt.
This article is actually about a health insurance company, but they don’t generally have cute CGI mascots
Next time you get an unwanted email, before you kick it into the bit-bucket, give it a quick read through. If it makes you go "WTF?!", kick it our way instead. We love 'em!
What's in a name anyway? (From Chris)
"One very helpful error, followed by another, and then Oracle Forms Designer crashed," Owen C. wrote, "I suppose at least it made an effort to tell me something was wrong!"
On April 10th, I hosted The Daily WTF: Live! in Pittsburgh. It was a blast. We had a great crowd, and some great performances.
Our final story is another one of my own, and this one is about… the worst boss ever. I mean it, and in this story, I can prove it. This is also arguably my first interaction with a real WTF.
Whenever a program needs to perform a long running process, it’s important that it supplies some sort of progress indicator, so the user knows that it’s running. Sometimes it’s a throbber, a progress bar, an hourglass, or the infamous spinning beachball of death.
Carol inherited this PHP code, which wants to use a series of dots (“….”)
As most of you know, this last month I have been running another Kickstarter campaign, Programming Languages ABC++: an alphabet book all about programming.
In the same spirit as Release!, and The Daily WTF, this project focused on the culture that surrounds our day jobs. Specifically in this case, it was all about getting kids interested in what we do.
Tim, the Hardware Enchanter worked at a small hardware/software company which made specialized instruments for a variety of industrial applications. When he wasn’t busy blowing up the English countryside, he designed hardware as well as its firmware- a mix of C and assembly code- which had to fit into 32KB of program memory with 2KB of RAM. He hardly ever touched application code, and was happy with that arrangement.
Managing namespaces in JavaScript presents its own challenge, since the language’s default behavior is to start slapping things into window
. For this reason, people have built a number of libraries and practices to solve this problem.
Jared’s company, for example, uses RequireJS to load dependencies, like the lodash utility-belt library. Sadly for Jared, their new hire proved that all the module-loading libraries in the world don’t solve incompetence.
"This warning comes highly recommended!" writes Sean H.
On April 10th, I hosted The Daily WTF: Live! in Pittsburgh. It was a blast. We had a great crowd, and some great performances.
Sarah is a long-time reader of The Daily WTF, and manages to be "all over" the local tech scene. I've met her at a few TDWTF meetups, but also seen her at Code & Supply events. And today's story features robots, so what's not to love.
A few months back, Alex announced our sponsorship program. This has been a great partnership that’s helped us bring you our regular content, but also special features like TDWTF: Live.
We’re proud to introduce our second sponsor: Infragistics
Rebecca inherited some code that’s responsible for gathering statistical data from network interface. It was originally written a decade ago by one of those developers who wanted to make certain their influence was felt long after they left the company.
The code was supposed to write to one of two log files: a “quick log”, with 2-second resolution (but only for the last minute’s data), and a “full log”, with 1-minute resolution.
“You should get some real-world experience.”
D.H. was in college to study video game programming, and his professors encouraged him to find an internship. “The real programming business is nothing like these university assignments.”
Booleans! What can you say? They're deceivingly complex features of any language, and only the most proficient among us is capable of using them properly.
Miss M. discovered that one of her cow-orkers found a new way to get the most mileage out of a single boolean variable named count in a single method to see if:
May 15
