The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Pittsburgh WTFers: A Storytelling Workshop

by Remy Porter in Announcements on 2014-08-26

Part of what brought me into writing and editing for The Daily WTF was my love of telling stories. I’ve had a very successful career working inside of corporate IT shops, and a huge part of that success comes from my ability to take a complex technical topic and explain it simply. To do that, I fall back on the same storytelling techniques that I use here.

A lot of real-world WTFs could be avoided through better communication, and while I hate the idea of losing out on more fodder for the site, it’s my duty as an IT drone to try and stamp out WTFs.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2014-08-28

The Constant Bomb

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2014-08-18

On one hand, this Java class Jim found is just another instance where somebody made constants like this:

	public static final String NO_SPACE = "";
	public static final String SINGLE_SPACE = " ";
	public static final String DOUBLE_SPACE = "  ";
	public static final String ZERO = "0";
	public static final String FLAG_Y = "Y";
	public static final String FLAG_N = "N";

84 comments - Last comment @ 2014-09-06

Nuclear Internship

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2014-08-12

Before he could graduate, Grigori’s Russian university program required him to complete a large-scale, real-world project. Like most of his peers, he planned to use this as an opportunity for job experience, which meant partnering with an outside company. Since Grigori did low-level development and microelectronic engineering, he found a paid internship position with the Russian Automation Institute. RAI has one major client: the company responsible for managing Russia’s nuclear reactors and supply parts for nuclear weapons.

Before Grigori could start working, his soon-to-be mentor assigned him a “test”. “Before you begin, you must implement this conversion.” The conversion in question was to turn IEEE754 floating points into a “secret” format. The spec document was a three column spreadsheet- a floating point number, a binary32 floating point number, and the “secret” format.
“Can I have more details?” Grigori asked Aleksandr. “Is there any documentation about the format?”

51 comments - Last comment @ 2021-08-22