The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Pipe Up

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2010-06-29

Amit checked his latest code in and turned to more interesting work. It didn't take much to be more interesting than writing a CSV parser. That was kid's stuff, really. With the low-hanging fruit out of the way, Amit could focus on the more mission critical aspects that were on tight deadlines. He had designed the module with a little extra polish; it was generic and should be easy to modify in the future. That was a smart decision, as a few days later the requirements changed. The application also needed to be able to handle pipe (|) separated values data. Since Amit was tied up on more important work, his manager stopped by to ask a few questions.

"How difficult do you think this would be?" John asked.

184 comments - Last comment @ 2010-12-14

Venting Frustration

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2010-06-24

It takes ambition and funding to build the "best datacenter in the world". Bi-located on the East and West coast, with multiple fat pipes, doubly-redudant power generation, armed security guards, and a Network Operations Center with giant plasma screens scrolling network statuses that are monitored by a 24/7 staff always looking busy, such a datacenter would serve only the highest-end clients. It takes one more key ingredient though: timing. Building a high-end datacenter in the middle of the deepest recession in decades isn't the recipe for success. Only a handful of clients ever moved in, and they were moving back out when the datacenter decided to shut down operations for good. Nearly everyone had been laid off, which left Ryan as the lone IT guy.

It was a lonely, and slightly creepy, position. Day after day, he sat alone in an abandoned office building, with only the security guard for company. During those weeks, his mind wandered, inventing noises where there were none, inventing strange interpretations for the noises that were there. He kept his sanity and balanced his time between building walkthroughs, marathon Minesweeper sessions, and browsing IT humor sites to remind himself that things could be far worse than drawing a check to warm a chair.

93 comments - Last comment @ 2010-11-04

Maximum Pad

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2010-06-16

Brian's company needs to track financial information indexed by 100 digit routing numbers. Now, obviously, not all of those digits are significant, so if a user enters "123", the application needs to be smart enough to pad out the other 97 digits with leading zeros. Sane people might think this should be implemented as a one-line call to a built-in method. The more DIY among us might waste time building up a for loop. And, of course, a LISP fan would simply torture future coders with recursion and parentheses.

Then there's this approach that Brian found:

221 comments - Last comment @ 2010-08-31

Secured Typing

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2010-06-08

Credit: sonrisa electrica @ flickr Gary's company has an "enterprise" application, and like any enterprise application, it was built to be all things for all people, by people that didn't have a clear picture of which things it was supposed to be to whom. While a customer could, in theory, install and configure it on their own, pretty much everyone paid for a consultant to handle the setup for them. Gary was one of those consultants.

Gary was scheduled to be at the client site for a week, which was plenty of time for the basic install and configuration. But before he could even get three steps through the door, the company "Security Czar", Norman, tackled him and then locked him in a dingy, windowless room with a two foot tall stack of forms. Of course, Gary was used to signing NDAs and the like, but Gary's management usually handled the negotiations, and the documents were usually a few pages of legalese, not a Neal Stephenson book.

153 comments - Last comment @ 2011-02-01

Surpassing the Master

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2010-06-03

Jibran turned in some questionable programming code when he was a student in college. Then again, who didn't? It's a student's sacred right to drive instructors to drink. There are no WTFs in student code; everyone has to learn sometime.

Unfortunately, Dr. Talbot's 100-level Java class focused more on providing barriers to learning. Talbot's voice had a nasal drone that would make bagpipes cringe but was so monotonous it could put an elephant under. Nor did he have any ability to organize a classroom session; he delivered material in a haphazard ramble that only covered half of the the outline. Jibran generally dozed through the session, and if he was lucky, woke up before it ended and caught the day's assignment.

227 comments - Last comment @ 2016-11-20