The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Agreement

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2017-06-29

In addition to our “bread and butter” of bad code, bad bosses, worse co-workers and awful decision-making, we always love the chance to turn out occassional special events. This time around, our sponsors at Hired gave us the opportunity to build and film a sketch.

I’m super-excited for this one. It’s a bit more ambitious than some of our previous projects, and pulled together some of the best talent in the Pittsburgh comedy community to make it happen. Everyone who worked on it- on set or off- did an excellent job, and I couldn't be happier with the results.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-01

The Internet of Nope

by Remy Porter in News Roundup on 2017-06-28

Folks, we’ve got to talk about some of the headlines about the Internet of “Things”. If you’ve been paying even no attention to that space, you know that pretty much everything getting released is some combination of several WTFs, whether in conception, implementation, and let’s not forget security.

I get it. It’s a gold-rush business. We’ve got computers that are so small, so cheap, and so power-efficient, that we can slap the equivalent of a 1980s super-computer in a toilet seat. There's the potential to create products that make our lives better, that make the world better, and could carry us into a glowing future. It just sometimes feels like that's not what anybody's actually trying to make, though. Without even checking, I’m sure you can buy a WiFi enabled fidget spinner that posts the data to a smartphone app where you can send “fidges” to your friends, bragging about your RPMs.

35 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-20

A Lazy Cat

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-06-21

The innermost circle of Hell, as we all know, is trying to resolve printer driver issues for all eternity. Ben doesn’t work with the printers that we mere mortals deal with on a regular basis, though. He runs a printing press, three stories of spinning steel and plates and ink and rolls of paper that could crush a man.

Like most things, the press runs Linux- a highly customized, modified version of Linux. It’s a system that needs to be carefully configured, as “disaster recovery” has a slightly different meaning on this kind of heavy equipment. The documentation, while thorough and mostly clear, was obviously prepared by someone who speaks English as a second language. Thus, Ben wanted to check the shell scripts to better understand what they did.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2017-06-30

Highly Functional

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2017-06-19

For a brief period of time, say, about 3–4 years ago, if you wanted to sound really smart, you’d bring up “functional programming”. Name-dropping LISP or even better, Haskell during an interview marked you as a cut above the hoi polloi. Even I, surly and too smart for this, fell into the trap of calling JavaScript “LISP with curly braces”, just because it had closures.

Still, functional programming features have percolated through other languages because they work. They’re another tool for the job, and like any tool, when used by the inexpert, someone might lose a finger. Or perhaps someone should lose a finger, if only as a warning to others.

33 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-31

The Gassed Pump

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2017-06-08

“Staff augmentation,” was a fancy way of saying, “hey, contractors get more per hour, but we don’t have to provide benefits so they are cheaper,” but Stuart T was happy to get more per hour, and even happier to know that he’d be on to his next gig within a few months. That was how he ended up working for a national chain of gas-station/convenience stores. His job was to build a “new mobile experience for customer loyalty” (aka, wrapping their website up as an app that can also interact with QR codes).

At least, that’s what he was working on before Miranda stormed into his cube. “Stuart, we need your help. ProdTrack is down, and I can’t fix it, because I’ve got to be at a mandatory meeting in ten minutes.”

50 comments - Last comment @ 2022-05-21

A Promise of Timing

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-06-07

Asynchronous programming is hard, and there’s never been a perfect way to solve that problem. One of the most widely used solutions is the “promise” or “future”. We wrap the asynchronous process up in a, well, promise of a future result. “Someday, there will be data here, I hope.” The real beauty of promises comes from their composability- “getData promises to fetch some records, and then the calling method can promise to display them.”

Of course, it’s still asynchronous, and when an application has multiple asynchronous processes happening at the same time, “weird behavior” can happen, thanks to timing issues. Keith W encountered one of those timing related Heisenbugs, and became immediately suspicious about how it was getting invoked:

24 comments - Last comment @ 2017-06-13

Variation on a Theme

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-06-05

If you’re not already aware, the Daily WTF is open source. We went the route of building our own CMS mostly because our application needs are pretty light. We don’t need themes, we don’t need WYSIWYG editors, we don’t need asset uploads. Also, with home-grown code, we know what’s in it, what it does, and any problems in the code are our own.

Which brings us to WordPress, land of the themes. There’s a cottage industry around building WordPress themes, and it’s a busy enough space that there are specialists in developing themes for specific industries. Alessandro ended up doing some work in the real estate business, tweaking a WP theme to change the way certain images would get displayed in a slide show.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-01

Switched Over

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-06-01

Twelve years ago, a company decided they needed a website. They didn’t have any web developers, and they didn’t want to hire any, so they threw a PHP manual at the new hire who happened to “be good with computers”, and called it a day.

Ms. “Good With Computers” actually learned something from the experience, and moved on to a lucrative career in web development. Unfortunately, she left behind the code she learned by doing, and now Bert has been brought in to clean up the code.

42 comments - Last comment @ 2017-06-05