The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2.π: Hiring Spree

by Mark Bowytz in Mandatory Fun Day on 2009-12-31

This comic never ended up getting used in Mandatory Fun Day Series 2, and I figured what better time than classics week '09 to bring it out! Enjoy.

86 comments - Last comment @ 2013-06-01

The Proven Fix

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2009-12-17

Photo Credit: Bryan Ledgard @ flickr There are lots of ways to ruin a batch of steel.

Just like making a cake, add in too much of one ingredient, add an ingredient at the wrong time, or heat everything to the wrong temperature, and it could all end in disaster. But in the case of a steel mill, we're talking about a 150 ton cake made of red-hot molten iron that's worth millions of dollars. Obviously, the risk of messing things up is a little bit higher. So, to help keep potential financial disaster at bay, the plants remove part of the human error factor and rely upon automated systems to keep things humming along smoothly. Systems much like the ones made by the company where Robert M. was a development manager.

155 comments - Last comment @ 2023-10-08

Thank You for Enabling JavaScript!

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2009-12-09

Clean data makes me smile.

No really! When I have a finite number of brain cycles to dedicate to some process that receives user data, it makes me quite the happy guy knowing that it has been pre-scrubbed for such nasties as newline characters, the occasional ☺, or worse, the dreaded ಠ_ಠ.

83 comments - Last comment @ 2010-03-25

The "Who Knows?" Code

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2009-12-02

When Vladimir first received his orders, the blood drained from his face. He was to take the legacy VB5 application, a system used daily by scores of users daily, and uplift it to C++.

After reviewing a few parts of the application, things began looking hopeless, however there was some good news! Vladimir had a department full of developers at his disposal and most of them had a hand in the creating and maintenance of the application.

245 comments - Last comment @ 2011-11-07