The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Just Following Out of Order Orders

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2020-02-28

"Instructables alphabetic sorting by each country's name in its own language (i.e. Spain == Espana) is a great idea, but it kind of makes for a hard to navigate list," writes Peter L.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2020-03-02

A Blacklisted Senior

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-02-27

Damien has the “pleasure” of supporting JavaScript code which runs, not in a browser or Node, but inside of a proprietary runtime specialized in handling high-performance collection datatypes. You can write extremely fast code, so long as you’re using the collection types correctly. This is good, because a lot of those JavaScript blocks have to be executed for every single request. Milliseconds of execution time add up faster than you think.

One of Damien’s senior peers needed to add some code that would filter fields out of a response. Data fetched from the database would be compared against a blacklist of fields to exclude- those fields should be removed from the collection.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2020-03-04

Producing Self Joins

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-02-26

Wesley considers himself an “intermediate SQL-er”. The previous “database expert”, though, has moved on to greener pastures, and now Wesley is “the database person”. This means that they need to pick through a bunch of stored procedures and triggers and try and understand the undocumented, unversion-controlled database code.

The upshot, is that Wesley is starting to feel like his intermediate skills might be more “expert” than the previous expert.

37 comments - Last comment @ 2020-03-05

Break your Labels

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-02-25

Nedra writes “I discovered this code while cleaning up and refactoring some label printing methods in a home-grown ERP that I maintain.”

The code in question “works most of the time”, which means it’s crossed a line of code quality. Speaking of crossing lines, this particular block of code needs to take information about how a product is formulated and print it on a label. These sorts of ERP functions are “mission critical”, in that correct and accurate formulations- whether the ingredients list on a foodstuff or the ingredients in a can of paint, or an industrial solvent- are required for regulatory compliance.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-28

The Label Printer

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-02-24

If you create a UI object in code, you have to go through all that pesky, annoying work of initalizing that object so it displays correctly. I mean, who wants to write VB.NET code which looks like this:

Label = New Label
Label.Size = New Size(710, 300)
Label.TextLB = "Operation:"
someForm.Controls.Add(Label)

28 comments - Last comment @ 2020-03-03

Identification Without Authentication

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2020-02-21

Mark M. wrote, "While I was reading the Feb 6th DailyWTF, Feedly chimed in with this helpful comment that really put it in context."

26 comments - Last comment @ 2020-03-05

It's For DIVision

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-02-20

We’ve discussed the evil of the for-case pattern in the past, but Russell F offers up a finding which is an entirely new riff on this terrible, terrible idea.

We’re going to do this is chunks, because it’s a lot of code.

31 comments - Last comment @ 2020-06-08

Copy/Paste Culture

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2020-02-19

Mark F had just gone to production on the first project at his new job: create a billables reconciliation report that an end-user had requested a few years ago. It was clearly not a high priority, which was exactly why it was the perfect items to assign a new programmer.

"Unfortunately," the end user reported, "it just doesn't seem to be working. It's running fine on test, but when I run it on the live site I'm getting a SELECT permission denied on the object fn_CalculateBusinessDays message. Any idea what that means?"

40 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-26

Logs in the Cloud

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2020-02-18

Carrol C just joined IniTech. They were hiring for someone who could help them tame their cloud costs. There’s a lot of money being spent on AWS. Management had bought in on the “it’s cheaper than on-prem”, and were starting to wonder why that promise wasn’t being fulfilled.

After a little settling in period, Carrol had his credentials for their AWS environment, and started digging around just to familiarize himself with the infrastructure. This environment had started as an on-prem system that got migrated to the cloud, so the infrastructure was mostly a collection of virtual-machines using attached virtual disks- EBS- for storing data.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-20

Legacy Documentation

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-02-17

Vernice inherited a legacy web app. By "legacy" in this case, we mean "lots of jQuery." jQuery everywhere. Nested callbacks of HTTP requests, no separation of concerns at all, just an entire blob of spaghetti code that was left out on the counter and is now stuck together as a big blob of sauceless starch. And as for documentation? There isn't any. No technical documentation. No comments. The code didn't even pretend to be self-documenting.

For the past few months, Vernice has been tasked with adding features. This generally meant that she'd find the code she thought was responsible for that section of the app, change something, see nothing happen, realize she was looking at the wrong module, try that three more times, finally find the actual code that governed that behavior, but as it turns out it had downstream dependents which broke.

30 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-24

A Taste of Nil

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2020-02-14

"This nil looks pretty tasty, but I think I’m allergic to it since I always feel sick when I see it in my debugger," Kevin T. writes.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2023-03-10

The Powerful Parent

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-02-13

As we’ve explored recently, developers will often latch onto something they pick up in one language and carry it forward with them into others. Kerry still is working with the co-worker who has… odd ideas about how things should work. At is turns out, this developer is also a Highly Paid Consultant, which we just discussed yesterday.

The latest problem Kerry found was in a display grid. It lists off a bunch of information linked to the user’s account, and each entry on the grid has a little plus sign on it to display further details. What, exactly, appears on that grid is tied to your account. It’s also worth noting that this service has a concept of corporate accounts- a “parent” account can administer entries for all their child accounts.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-18

Hop Scotch

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2020-02-12

IniTech’s fashion division, IniGarment, launched their new accounting solution by hiring “best in class” highly-paid-consultants (HPCs). The system launched, collapsed under the weight of the first week of use, hardware was thrown at the problem in an absolute crisis panic, and the end result was that they had a perfectly serviceable accounting package that was overbudget and supported by expensive HPCs.

It wasn’t sustainable. So out the HPCs went, and in came a pile of salaried employees. Jeff was one of those. His first six weeks at IniGarment were spent trying to understand the nest of stored procedures, quick hacks, and ugly choices. One of the first puzzles Jeff decided to look into was an invoice uploading step.

42 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-14

Install Your Package

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-02-11

I use Python a lot at work, and if you're doing anything vaguely data oriented, you want to use NumPy. I gave a talk about how much I love NumPy. It's one of the things that I automatically include in every requriements.txt because it's so goddamn useful.

Lanny supports a product which uses NumPy, which is why he was surprised to find this block:

31 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-15

Without Directions

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2020-02-10

Adam S sends us a representative line which represents a mystery. It's a simple enough Java statement:

private static final Integer[] DIRECTIONS = { 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 };

46 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-19

Con(text)ual Errors

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2020-02-07

"A football coach needs at least a two line footer to succeed," writes Ergin S.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-11

On the Hard Problems

by Remy Porter in Coded Smorgasbord on 2020-02-06

As the saying goes, there are two hard problems in computer science: naming things, cache expiration, and off-by-one errors. This little snipped of anonymously supplied PHP code highlights the first one of those challenges:

    // if no error commit
    if ($is_fail) {
        $binder->commit();
    }

39 comments - Last comment @ 2020-04-16

Going Down to the Object Store

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-02-05

Odette’s company uses a popular video conferencing solution for browser use. In the base library, there’s a handy-dandy class called ObjectStorage, which implements an in-memory key/value store entirely in TypeScript/JavaScript.

“Wait,” you ask, “isn’t a JavaScript in-memory, key/value store just… an object? A map, if you’re being pedantic?”

21 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-11

A Short REST

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2020-02-04

I’m starting to wonder if we need a “Representative API” category. There are just so many ways in which a developer can mess up basic tasks, like mapping a RESTful API to their backend.

Today’s anonymous submitter was working with a REST API provided by a “world leading parcel” company. Everything started well. The documentation was thorough, contained links to example projects, and it came with a Swagger API doc. Based on that documentation and based on the Swagger doc, they went ahead and tried to CURL the API for a specific endpoint:

68 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-07

An Accident

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-02-03

There's a very specific brand of bad code that I see from time to time, which I think of as "Oh, this poor person was permanently damaged by exposure to C." They're not writing C, but there's something about their "accent" which tells you: they learned C and didn't recover from the experience. Every reference variable can be treated like a pointer if you're insistent enough.

There are other, similarly brain-breaking languages. COBOL. PL/SQL. VBA. Programmers learn the quirks of these languages, fail to understand them, and then start writing weirdly formal, structured code in languages that aren't supposed to work that way.

39 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-11

Recent Articles