The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Dude Looks Like a Lady

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2014-03-28

The costume that Ray V. found reminds me of a certain Aerosmith song.

54 comments - Last comment @ 2014-04-03

Bourne to be While

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2014-03-27

Alvaro M. used to work as a contractor for large US store chain where many things were accomplished via shell scripts. The majority of which were written by one guy who was the "expert" on scripting - a veritable scripting guru.

Scripts doing infinite loops and then sleeping for an hour were often the norm. The reasoning behind these being that "cron used too much server resources!" There was even a server where every user was allowed to put their scripts, that was painfully slow to use, partially because at any time you could see a couple hundred instances of 'sleep'...for example:

78 comments - Last comment @ 2014-04-08

Hurry! The Daily WTF Survey Ends Soon!

by Mark Bowytz in Announcements on 2014-03-26

Come April 1st, the survey page will disappear from all existence...leaving juicy data in its wake.

Is your data in there? If so thanks! If not, do it now! Get to the choppa!

27 comments - Last comment @ 2017-04-04

Ever Work with Offshore Development Teams?

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2014-03-21

"I have a feeling this position posted by Hawaiian Airlines might involve working with developers who are located offshore," writes Jeff Buck.

46 comments - Last comment @ 2014-03-28

Test Driven Delay

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2014-03-19

The application that Motumbo works on has huge codebase and very few tests. The majority of these exist to test integration and interact with the DB or other external systems - they either print something out or rely on exceptions being thrown.

The rest, didn't actually work (e.g. reference local paths) and weren't executed in the main build. Instead, there's a separate build which runs them and succeeds even if they fail. Thankfully, this situation was correctly recognized as being ridiculous and the decision was made to clean house and either fix or remove the useless, broken ones.

59 comments - Last comment @ 2014-03-24

A Delicious British Holiday Treat?

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2014-03-14

"I wasn't very impressed by the choices of chocolates offered around Christmas last year," David N. wrote.

75 comments - Last comment @ 2014-03-21

Some Useful Bits

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2014-03-13

A junior developer recently left the firm that Graham works for. In an act of great kindness and generosity, before officially departing, he sent to the developer who had inherited his work a file titled 'Useful_Bits.txt' - some code that he had lovingly written and could potentially be reused.

The file included, among many other things, the below gems. The last one had reportedly taken ages to write but the departing dev got upset when it was pointed out that you could do it in one line by overloading ToString() or using string.Format()...

62 comments - Last comment @ 2014-03-17

Knowing is Half the Battle

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2014-03-11

At Initrode, their main business is large-scale data warehousing. Their products are used by the biggest companies in the world, and to keep up with demand, naturally, they have hundreds of rock star developers churning out incredible solutions.

They also have Commander Joe.

78 comments - Last comment @ 2014-03-19

Pixels are Expensive!

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2014-03-07

"I'm not quite sure what to think of the software developer who apparently thought that the perfect way to say you wanted to continue was to choose 'cancel'," Dirk wrote, "Maybe another button just wasn't in the budget"

110 comments - Last comment @ 2014-04-23

We are NOT Meatbots!

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2014-03-05

Sales, as everyone knows, is the mortal enemy of Development.

Their goals are opposite, their people are opposite, their tactics are opposite. Even their credos - developers "Make a good product" but sales will "Do anything to get that money" - are at complete odds.

71 comments - Last comment @ 2014-10-11