Alex Papadimoulis

Founder, The Daily WTF

Jan 2011

An Empty Offer

by in Error'd on

"I can think of all kinds of ways to use $0," Steve wrote, "pay off my $0 credit card balance, pay my $0 dentist bill..."


Stored Procedures, The Porn Guy, and Non-returnable Email

by in Tales from the Interview on

Stored Procedures (from Liz)
There was an article posted a little while back (Does Not Compute) that featured confusion of fairly-common tech-isms like Cookies or the Recycle Bin. It was fun, but not terribly surprising considering that everyone is not technically inclined.

I was surprised, however, when a Does Not Compete happened during an interview for a database developer position. My question was fairly straightforward: tell me about your experience with stored procedures.


How the Big Companies Do It

by in CodeSOD on

"I recently was hired by a very large company as a software developer, and I couldn't wait to start," writes Philipp B, "Having mostly worked for small shops, this seemed like a great opportunity to see how large teams of developers build and maintain complex business applications."

"It turned out to be quite the opportunity. Databases? Naaah... just use a bunch of XML (or sometimes CSV) files. Deployments? Naaah... just copy the project files (including the source code) to the 'wwwroot' folder on the web server. Architecture... definitely! Copy/paste is a pattern, right?" One thing that was common was the vast amount of code to do seemingly simple things. For example, determine whether Yes ('ja') or No ('nein') should be displayed on a report."


Enterprise Incrementation

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“For the past six months,” Jose C writes, “I’ve been struggling with our vendor – let’s call them ‘Enterprise Associates’ – to get the source code for the Enterprise module of their ‘Enterprise ERP for Enterprises’ software. Now we normally don’t expect source code from vendor software, but this was specifically in our contract. Partially because they wrote it on our dime, but mostly because we needed to do some serious customization to make it work.”

“They delivered excuse after excuse after excuse, but they all were something like, ‘we are still ensuring our code meets Enterprise Associates release standards and that it is fully documented and supportable by our Enterprise support team.’ And then finally, it came.”


Violent Penguins

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"I don't remember March of the Penguins being violent," wrote Sam C, "what does Netflix know that I don't?"


The Phantom Duo

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Credit: gralm @ flickrFor as long as David B could remember, stories of The Phantom Duo were a popular pastime around the watercooler. Of course, no one had actually worked with them, but everyone knew someone who knew someone that did. And the tall tales told why.

As the story went, The Phantom Duo were corporate boogeymen who reported to no one. They’d scour the project charter, looking for healthy, on-time, and on-budget projects that they could latch-on to. Once they were assigned to a project, it was too late: anything they’d touch would crash and burn, taking everyone else with it. Obviously, since anyone who worked with The Phantom Duo would no longer be working, only hearsay and rumor supported the legend.


A Complex Range

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"What integer do you suppose fits in this range?" wonders Spencer


Confessions: The Shopping Cart

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Last month, rachetingDateObject showed us something a little different: a curious perversions that was actually created by the submitter. This time, Brian F decided to share his story.

Do you have any confessions you'd like to make? Send them on in.



All In The Config

by in Representative Line on

"From the first minute of the first hour of the first day of my job," Aaron writes, "I knew I had an epic WTF on my hands."

"I spent a while writing up a 1,600-word long description of this system, only to realize it wasn’t nearly enough. So I kept going. 1,950 words… still not enough. 2,300 words… barely scratching the surface.


Sponsor Appreciation: Russian Testing, OMG Landscaping, and More

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Please take a moment to check out the companies that sponsor The Daily WTF.

TDWTF Sponsors

ChangeVision   ChangeVision - makers of astah*, a comprehensive modeling toolset that works with UML, ERD, DFD and mind mapping models within the same integrated platform. There's both a free trial and a free community edition available. They also put out a pretty unique guide called Zen and The Art of User Requirements that's worth a quick read.
BuildMaster   BuildMaster - an easy way to automate your build, deploy, and configuration process all the way through production. Basically, it's application lifecycle management the way it should be: platform neutral, process neutral, and tool neutral.
SoftLayer   SoftLayer - serious hosting provider with datacenters in three cities (Dallas, Seattle, DC) that has plans designed to scale from a single, dedicated server to your own virtual data center (complete with racks and all)

And now, for something completely different... or at least a little fun and off-topic.


XML'd XML

by in CodeSOD on

"We recently implemented the webservice interface from our vendors," Eric writes, "they're a large and generally well-respected software service firm."

"Their webservice returns SOAP messages — which is just fine — but instead of returning a useful XML string, it returns this."


The Enterprise Dependency

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Like all good enterprisey development organizations, Jerod’s has an Enterprise Architecture Group that’s responsible for maintaining the Enterprise Framework. And like all good enterprise frameworks, Jerod’s is several dozen megabytes chock full of helper classes like IEnterpriseAuthenticationProviderFactoryManagementFactory.

Jerod does his best to avoid using the Enterprise Framework, but sometimes enterprise happens and he has no choice but to include it. Usually, it’s not that big of a deal, but when he was tasked with building a Windows client application that would be frequently deployed to mobile employees over a VPN over a cell-phone data connection, he needed to find a way to trim the size of the framework.