The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Fruity Loop

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2012-07-30

They might have been chipping their code out of the living mountain with stone tools and classic ASP, but they weren't primitive. Colt's development team still required code reviews of all of the classic ASP code before it went to production. Sure, most of the time, an ASP code review ended with, "ARGH WHY WHY MY EYES THE PAIN!", but the code still got reviewed.

During one review, Colt noticed something odd about his co-worker's file-upload module. The module was meant to handle pretty small CSV files, and even had a check to ensure they weren't larger than expected. That wasn't the odd part.

107 comments - Last comment @ 2013-11-22

Take a Walk on the Client Side

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2012-07-18

"Performance matters," Bob was told on his first day. The company prided itself on using the latest, cutting-edge techniques, and emphasized the use of client-side code to keep the application responsive.

One day, while tracking down a JavaScript error, he got a very good picture of how their client-side code actually worked:

54 comments - Last comment @ 2013-06-20

Just a Warm-Up

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2012-07-10

Brian worked for the American government. Specifically, he worked for a small branch on a very small project with a budget so small that it was governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. To cut costs, the pointy-haired, grey-suited bureaucrats that ran the office found all sorts of inventive ways to save money, most of which were just minor nuisances that could generally be ignored.

One particularly annoying technique, however, was that they set the thermostats at 55ºF, then locked them in plastic cages so that those pesky and expensive developers wouldn't waste precious government funds on wasteful things like "heat", "comfort" and "having fingers that aren't blue at the tips". In a state like Hawaii, that might not have been a problem, but these poor developers lived in the other non-contiguous state in the Union, in a place where the average summer temperature was a hair shy of 60ºF.

241 comments - Last comment @ 2018-05-25