The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Why I Hate Conference Swag (and What can be Done About it)

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2018-08-31

Hey everyone - I'm at a conference this week I'd like to cover a WTF that I've been seeing this week - VENDOR SWAG.

35 comments - Last comment @ 2019-07-02

Keeping Up Appearances

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-08-30

Just because a tool is available doesn't mean people will use it correctly. People have abused booleans, dates, enums, databases, Go-To's, PHP, reinventing the wheel and even Excel to the point that this forum will never run out of material!

Bug and issue trackers are Good Things™. They let you keep track of multiple projects, feature requests, and open and closed problems. They let you classify the issues by severity/urgency. They let you specify which items are going into which release. They even let you track who did the work, as well as all sorts of additional information.

An optical illusion in which two squares that are actually the same color appear to be different colors

26 comments - Last comment @ 2018-09-07

Rectangle Marks The Spot

by Ellis Morning in CodeSOD on 2018-08-29

If you need your user's country of origin, there are many ways you can go about obtaining it programmatically. Some may opt for a simple drop-down that prompts the user to specify his/her country. If you don't want to burden your user this way, you might look at their session data and return their country of origin, time zone, or some other useful information. If you have fancy enough APIs at your disposal, you could even reverse geocode the user's longitude/latitude position and obtain an address.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2018-09-10

Look Ahead. Look Out!

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-08-28

I'm an old person. It's the sort of thing that happens when you aren't looking. All the kids these days are writing Slack and Discord bots in JavaScript, and I remember writing my first chatbots in Perl and hooking them into IRC. Fortunately, all the WTFs in my Perl chatbots have been lost to time.

"P" has a peer who wants to scrape all the image URLs out of a Discord chat channel. Those URLs will be fetched, then passed through an image processing pipeline to organize and catalog frequently used images, regardless of their origin.

38 comments - Last comment @ 2018-08-31

Assertive Programming

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-08-27

Defensive programming is an important tool in any developer's toolbox. In strictly typed languages, types themselves provide a natural defense against certain classes of bugs, but in loosely typed languages, you may have to be more clear about your assumptions.

For example, in Python, you might choose to use the assert keyword to, well, assert that something is true. It's often used in debugging, but it's also a good way to ensure that the state of the parameters passed to a function, or some other state of your system is correct before doing anything else. If it's not, the code raises an exception.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2018-08-31

Exponential Customer Service

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-08-24

"I think I'm missing some precision in my Dell customer number," writes Steve B.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2022-11-25

Extending Yourself

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-08-23

Optional parameters are a great tool for building flexible APIs. In most languages, they're not strictly necessary- if you have function overloading, the difference between optional parameters and an overloaded function is just the quantity of boilerplate- but they're certainly a nice to have.

Well, they're a nice to have in the right hands.

53 comments - Last comment @ 2018-09-14

You Can Only Get What You Have

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2018-08-22

Sean's ongoing career as a consultant keeps supplying him with amazing code.

Let's talk about encapsulation. We put getters and setters around our objects internalsto help keep our code modular. Given an object, we call something like getUsername to extract a piece of that object safely.

47 comments - Last comment @ 2018-09-12

Is This Terning Into a Date?

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-08-21

Bad date handling code is like litter: offensive, annoying, but omnipresent. Nobody is specifically responsible for it, nobody wants to clean it up, and we end up ignoring it.

Murtaza K offers up a particularly malodorous example, though, that's worthy of note. It's got everything: string mangling, assumptions that ignore locale, bad ternaries, and it's completely unnecessary.

34 comments - Last comment @ 2018-09-12

Leaky Fun For the Whole Family

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-08-20

Those of us that had the luxury of learning to program in C or other non-auto-gc'd langauges, learned early on the habit of writing the allocation and deallocation of a block of memory at the same time, and only then filling in the code in between afterward. This prevented those nasty I-forgot-to-free-it memory leaks.

Of course, that doesn't guarantee that memory can't ever leak; it just eliminates the more obvious sources of leakage.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2023-05-27

The Illusion of Choice

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-08-17

"So I can keep my current language setting or switch to Pakistani English. THERE IS NO IN-BETWEEN," Robert K. writes.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2018-09-17

Tern This Statement Around and Go Home

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2018-08-16

When looking for representative lines, ternaries are almost easy mode. While there’s nothing wrong with a good ternary expression, they have a bad reputation because they can quickly drift out towards “utterly unreadable”.

Or, sometimes, they can drift towards “incredibly stupid”. This anonymous submission is a pretty brazen example of the latter:

32 comments - Last comment @ 2018-08-22

Isn't There a Vaccine For MUMPS?

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-08-15

Alex F is suffering from a disease. No, it’s not disfiguring, it’s not fatal. It’s something much worse than that.

It’s MUMPS.

45 comments - Last comment @ 2022-10-16

A Shell Game

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-08-14

When the big banks and brokerages on Wall Street first got the idea that UNIX systems could replace mainframes, one of them decided to take the plunge - Big Bang style. They had hundreds of programmers cranking out as much of the mainframe functionality as they could. Copy-paste was all the rage; anything to save time. It could be fixed later.

Senior management decreed that the plan was to get all the software as ready as it could be by the deadline, then turn off and remove the mainframe terminals on Friday night, swap in the pre-configured UNIX boxes over the weekend, and turn it all on for Monday morning. Everyone was to be there 24 hours a day from Friday forward, for as long as it took. Air mattresses, munchies, etc. were brought in for when people would inevitably need to crash.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2021-07-04

A Tapestry of Threads

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2018-08-13

A project is planned. Gantt charts are drawn up. Timelines are set. They're tight up against the critical path, because including any slack time in the project plan is like planning for failure. PMs have meetings. Timelines slip. Something must be done, and the PMs form a nugget of a plan.

That nugget squeezes out of their meeting, and rolls downhill until it lands on some poor developer's desk.

35 comments - Last comment @ 2018-08-17

Truth in Errors

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-08-10

Jakub writes, "I'm not sure restarting will make IE 'normal', but yeah, I guess it's worth a shot."

15 comments - Last comment @ 2018-08-13

Knowledge Transfer

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-08-09

Lucio Crusca is a consultant with a nice little portfolio of customers he works with. One of those customers was also a consultancy, and their end customer had a problem. The end customer's only in-house developer, Tyrell, was leaving. He’d worked there for 8 years, and nobody else knew anything about his job, his code, or really what exactly he’d been doing for 8 years.

They had two weeks to do a knowledge transfer before Tyrell was out the door. There was no chance of on-boarding someone in that time, so they wanted a consultant who could essentially act as a walking, talking USB drive, simply holding all of Tyrell’s knowledge until they could have a full-time developer.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2018-08-10

CDADA

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-08-08

If there’s one big problem with XML, it’s arguably that XML is overspecified. That’s not all bad- it means that every behavior, every option, every approach is documented, schematized, and defined. That might result in something like SOAP, which creates huge, bloated payloads, involves multiple layers of wrapping tags, integrates with discovery schemas, has additional federation and in-built security mechanisms, each of which are themselves defined in XML. And let’s not even start on XSLT and XQuery.

It also means that if you have a common task, like embedding arbitrary content in a safe fashion, there’s a well-specified and well-documented way to do it. If you did want to embed arbitrary content in a safe fashion, you could use the <![CDATA [Here is some arbitrary content]]> directive. It’s not a pretty way of doing it, but it means you don’t have to escape anything but ]]>, which is only a problem in certain esoteric programming languages with rude names.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2018-08-13

This Interview Doesn't Count

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-08-07

There are merits and disadvantages to including any sort of programming challenge in your interview process. The argument for something like a FizzBuzz challenge is that a surprising number of programmers can’t actually do that, and it weeds out the worst candidates and the liars.

Gareth was interviewing someone who purported to be a senior developer with loads of Java experience. As a standard part of their interview process, they do a little TDD based exercise: “here’s a test, here’s how to run it, now write some code which passes the test.”

42 comments - Last comment @ 2018-08-31

Constantly True

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2018-08-06

An anonymous reader had something to share.

"I came across this code in a 13,000 line file called Constants.cs."

32 comments - Last comment @ 2019-07-01

What the Truck?!

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-08-03

"I think I'll order the big-busted truck," writes Alicia.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2018-08-14

The Mike Test

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-08-02

The Joel Test is about to turn 18 this year. Folks have attempted to “update” it, but even after graduating high school, the test remains a good starting point for identifying a “good” team.

Mike was impressed to discover a PHP script which manages to fail a number of points on the Joel Test in only 8 lines.

30 comments - Last comment @ 2018-08-03

Fortran the Undying

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-08-01

There are certain languages which are still in use, are still changing and maturing, and yet are also frozen in time. Fortran is a perfect example- over the past 40–60 years, huge piles of code, mostly for scientific and engineering applications, was written. It may be hard to believe, but modern Fortran supports object-oriented programming and has a focus on concurrency.

Most of the people using Fortran, it seems, learned it in the 70s. And no matter what happens to the language, they still write code like it’s the 70s. Fortran’s own seeming immortality has imbued its users with necromantic energy, turning them into undying, and unchanging Liches.

37 comments - Last comment @ 2020-03-06

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