The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Best of 2015: To Spite Your Face…

by Remy Porter in Best of… on 2015-12-28

This article, from February had me cringing even as I reread it- and I wrote it! I've had the misfortune of working on a number of projects that failed because of people like Brandon making sure they failed. --Remy

“I’ve got a gig for you,” said the recruiter.

Clive, like many freelancers, weighed the contents of his bank account versus the daily rate he was promised, and decided that any gig was for him under those conditions. This one sounded mostly okay; an insurance company needed a new software package that would help them leap through some regulatory hoops. As a bonus, they wanted someone who could teach their devs the latest tools and techniques… like source control.

1 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-01

The PM Who Stole Christmas

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2015-12-24

It’s Christmas Eve, and that means we’re taking a little break from writing new articles. Starting next week, we’ll re-run all of the best articles of this year.

For today, though, while I was working on The Glitch Who Stole Christmas, I got a bit inspired, and maybe a bit carried away.
Instead of our usual fare, here’s something a little… different.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2015-12-25

The Glitch Who Stole Christmas

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2015-12-23

Every Who down in Whoville like Christmas a lot…
But the Bug, who lived just North of Whoville, did not!

Peter L sat on his recliner, wireless keyboard and mouse balanced on his lap, and watched Jebediah Kerman burn up on re-entry. It was “Cyber Monday”, also known as “look, the consumer didn’t buy enough stuff on ‘Black Friday’, so please buy more stuff!”

77 comments - Last comment @ 2015-12-24

The Apple Genius

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2015-12-22

Apple refers to their in-store technicians as “geniuses”. Everyone on Earth knows that it’s nothing more than cute marketing and is a meaningless title.

Well, almost everyone. Derick worked for a company where the CIO worked at Apple’s HQ at some point. Said CIO was quite proud of this achievement, and made sure everyone knew it. He wasn’t happy that his new startup had decided to use C#, but it was okay: he was ready to reinvent core pieces of the .NET framework to avoid having to deal with whatever bombs Microsoft had snuck in.

58 comments - Last comment @ 2016-01-07

The Returned Value

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2015-12-17

Wilson Silva was looking through some production code, and found this representative line. This particular block of Ruby code was written by someone who claimed to have “lots of programming experience”. One must wonder what that experience was.

59 comments - Last comment @ 2017-07-23

Leaving an Honest Comment

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2015-12-15

Apo’s workplace just recently migrated their code into source control. They have eight years of code that’s been written and maintained by developers using a network share as their central repository.

// Special treatment for Attribute "weight unit"
// Needs to be mapped to more readable values for display because SAP is using some ISO codes that are not understandable
// by normal users. Hence, if we encounter this attribute, we map it to resemble an easier understandable unit
// Yes, this is all hardcoded, yes "one" should not do that
// Please redirect any complaints to the peeps who do budgeting and the customer who is not paying to do this properly
if (idAttribute_ == 18500) {
        if (textblock_ == "KGM") {
                textblock_ = "KG";
        }
        if (textblock_ == "MGM") {
                textblock_ = "MG";
        }
        if (textblock_ == "GRM") {
                textblock_ = "G";
        }
}

97 comments - Last comment @ 2016-01-06

Collated Performance

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2015-12-09

Eliza had a co-worker who had a problem. There were users with names like “René”. Other users, using standard keyboards, wanted to search for “René”, but couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to type that accent, so they just searched for “Rene”.

The co-worker came up with this solution:

16 comments - Last comment @ 2015-12-10

Puppet Labs Sponsors 2016 and Launches a New Tool!

by Remy Porter in Announcements on 2015-12-08

Here at TDWTF, we’re happy to announce that Puppet Labs have renewed their sponsorship of TDWTF.

DevOps and infrastructure automation are at that critical cusp, where everyone’s talking about the buzzword, and everyone knows that it’s important, but most people don’t know exactly what it means to “do DevOps”. The tools we use to build infrastructure and deploy applications are changing fast, and the complexity is increasing: and complexity means more opportunities for WTFs.

10 comments - Last comment @ 2015-12-12

Hang On…

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2015-12-02

Once upon a time, there was a small logistics company that did most of their software development in house. In the early 2000s, they decided to get ahead of the curve, and started building software to work on mobile devices. At the time, it was risky and uncertain, but over the next few decades, the idea of using commodity mobile phones to run their warehouse management software saved the company piles of money.

They grew so big that they cut the company into two parts- Inilogic, the big giant logistics company, and Initech, which made their mobile phone software. In the split, some developers went to Initech, while a few- like Mr. A- stayed with Inilogic.

37 comments - Last comment @ 2015-12-04