Days of Future Passed

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2021-04-16

After reading through so many of your submissions these last few weeks, I'm beginning to notice certain patterns emerging. One of these patterns is that despite the fact that dates are literally as old as time, people seem pathologically prone to bungling them. Surely our readers are already familiar with the notable "Falsehoods Programmers Believe" series of blog posts, but if you happen somehow to have been living under an Internet rock (or a cabbage leaf) for the last few decades, you might start your time travails at Infinite Undo. The examples here are not the most egregious ever (there are better coming later or sooner) but they are today's:

10 comments - Last comment @ 18:42

Constantly Counting

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-04-15

Steven was working on a temp contract for a government contractor, developing extensions to an ERP system. That ERP system was developed by whatever warm bodies happened to be handy, which meant the last "tech lead" was a junior developer who had no supervision, and before that it was a temp who was only budgeted to spend 2 hours a week on that project.

This meant that it was a great deal of spaghetti code, mashed together with a lot of special-case logic, and attempts to have some sort of organization even if that organization made no sense. Which is why, for example, all of the global constants for the application were required to be in a class Constants.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2021-04-16

The Truth and the Truth

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-04-14

When Andy inherited some C# code from a contracting firm, he gave it a quick skim. He saw a bunch of methods with names like IsAvailable or CanPerform…, but he also saw that it was essentially random as to whether or not these methods returned bool or string.

That didn't seem like a good thing, so he started to take a deeper look, and that's when he found this.

12 comments - Last comment @ 2021-04-15

A Form of Reuse

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-04-13

Writing code that is reusable is an important part of software development. In a way, we're not simply solving the problem at hand, but we're building tools we can use to solve similar problems in the future. Now, that's also a risk: premature abstraction is its own source of WTFs.

Daniel's peer wrote some JavaScript which is used for manipulating form inputs on customer contact forms. You know the sorts of forms: give us your full name, phone number, company name, email, and someone from our team will be in touch. This developer wrote the script, and offered it to clients to enhance their forms. Well, there was one problem: this script would get embedded in customer contact forms, but not all customer contact forms use the same conventions for how they name their fields.

33 comments - Last comment @ 13:36

Exceptionally General

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-04-12

Andres noticed this pattern showing up in his company's code base, and at first didn't think much of it:

25 comments - Last comment @ 2021-04-15

Punfree Friday

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2021-04-09

Today's Error'd submissions are not so much WTF as simply "TF?" Please try to explain the thought process in the comments, if you can.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2021-04-12

A True Leader's Enhancement

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-04-08

Chuck had some perfectly acceptable C# code running in production. There was nothing terrible about it. It may not be the absolute "best" way to build this logic in terms of being easy to change and maintain in the future, but nothing about it is WTF-y.

if (report.spName == "thisReport" || report.spName == "thatReport")
{
  LoadUI1();
}
else if (report.spName == "thirdReport" || report.spName == "thirdReportButMoreSpecific")
{
  LoadUI2();
}
else
{
  LoadUI3();
}

26 comments - Last comment @ 2021-04-12

We All Expire

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-04-07

Code, like anything else, ages with time. Each minor change we make to a piece of already-in-use software speeds up that process. And while a piece of software can be running for decades unchanged, its utility will still decline over time, as its user interface becomes more distant from common practices, as the requirements drift from their intent, and people forget what the original purpose of certain features even was.

Code ages, but some code is born with an expiration date.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2021-04-09

He Sed What?

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-04-06

Today's code is only part of the WTF. The code is bad, it's incorrect, but the mistake is simple and easy to make.

Lowell was recently digging into a broken feature in a legacy C application. The specific error was a failure when invoking a sed command from inside the application.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2021-04-14

Switching Your Template

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-04-05

Many years ago, Kari got a job at one of those small companies that lives in the shadow of a university. It was founded by graduates of that university, mostly recruited from that university, and the CEO was a fixture at alumni events.

Kari was a rare hire not from that university, but she knew the school had a reputation for having an excellent software engineering program. She was prepared to be a little behind her fellow employees, skills-wise, but looked forward to catching up.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2021-04-08

Everybody Has A Testing Environment

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2021-04-02

“Some people,” said the sage, “are lucky enough to also have a completely separate environment for production.” Today's nuggets of web joy are pudding-proof.

9 comments - Last comment @ 2021-04-11

Announcing the launch of TFTs

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2021-04-01

Totally Fungible Tokens

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are an exciting new application of Blockchain technology that allows us to burn down a rainforest every time we want to trade a string representing an artist's signature on a creative work.

Many folks are eagerly turning JPGs, text files, and even Tweets into NFTs, but since not all of us have a convenient rainforest to destroy, The Daily WTF is happy to offer at alternative, the Totally Fungible Token

What Is a Totally Fungible Token?

23 comments - Last comment @ 2021-04-04

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