The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Best of 2019: The Internship of Things

by Remy Porter in Best of… on 2019-12-31

Did you get some nice shiny new IoT devices for the holidays this year? Hope they weren't the Initech brand. Original --Remy

Mindy was pretty excited to start her internship with Initech's Internet-of-Things division. She'd been hearing at every job fair how IoT was still going to be blowing up in a few years, and how important it would be for her career to have some background in it.

It was a pretty standard internship. Mindy went to meetings, shadowed developers, did some light-but-heavily-supervised changes to the website for controlling your thermostat/camera/refrigerator all in one device.

3 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-16

Classic WTF: The Glitch Who Stole Christmas

by Remy Porter in Best of… on 2019-12-25

It's Christmas, and we're going to spend the next week remembering the best moments of 2019, but for now, let's go back to an old Christmas classic. Original.

Every Dev down in Devville liked Christmas a lot…
But the PM who lived in the corner office did NOT!
The PM hated Christmas! The whole Christmas season!
Now, please don’t ask why. No one quite knows his reason.
It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right.
It could be, that his project timeline was too tight,
But I think the most likely reason of all,
May have been that his brain was two sizes too small.

2 comments - Last comment @ 2019-12-26

Caga Tió

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-12-24

As we plow into the holiday season, it’s important to remember that each submission- each bit of bad code, each horror story, each personal confession- is its own little gift to us. And, when you write a bit of bad code, you can think of it as a gift for whoever follows you.

8 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-07

Shining Brillance

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2019-12-18

Jarad was still recovering from his encounter with Intelligenuity’s most “brillant” programmer, Keisha, when a new hire, Aaron, showed up at Jarad’s office.

The large project that dominated their timelines remained their efforts to migrate from .NET to Java, but Aaron was hired to keep the .NET side of things on track, handling bugs, new features that were desperately needed, and just general maintenance. It was made emphatically clear by the project managers that hiring more .NET developers was not an admission that the conversion to Java had failed, but would “free up resources” to better focus on the Java side of things.

41 comments - Last comment @ 2019-12-19

We Go to School

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-12-17

Sometimes, it feels like any programming question you might have has a thread on StackOverflow. It might not have an answer, but it’s probably there. Between that, online guidebooks, tools with decent documentation, YouTube programming tutorials there are a lot of great ways to learn how to solve any given programming task.

Andreas R had a programming task. Specifically, Andreas wanted to create sortable tables that worked like those on MediaWiki sites. A quick google for “sort html table” turned up a source which offered… this.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-01

An Advent Calendar

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-12-16

Java date-time handling was notoriously bad for the vast majority of Java's lifetime. It was so bad that a third party library, Joda-Time, was the defacto standard for Java date processing until finally, in Java 8, the features, functionality, and design of Joda-Time were adopted into Java. JSR-310 added refinements to conventional datetime objects, like Timestamps and LocalDates, but also added useful classes like Instant (an immutable instant in time) and DateTimeFormatters that had a conventional and flexible API for doing date formatting and parsing.

Since JSR-310, it's easy to write good date handling code in Java.

10 comments - Last comment @ 2019-12-18

An Absolute Square

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2019-12-12

Seth S offers us something new: a representative line of Ada. We don’t get much of that, and Ada isn’t a particularly popular language, but Seth assures us that it is “unfairly maligned”.

Since 1995, Ada has been an object oriented language, and offers a standard library, strong types, a message-passing approach to communicating with objects (which migrated into Objective-C but generally doesn’t show up very often elsewhere). It’s a fine, if less-used language, and I honestly can’t say I’ve heard much maligning it (though I’ve never actually heard of anyone using it either…).

45 comments - Last comment @ 2019-12-20

Null Serializer

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-12-11

Nulls cause problems. Usually, they’re not big problems, but if a field might have a value- or none at all- we have to be careful with how we handle it.

Languages like C# have added Nullable types, which wrap around those problems. But sometimes, you need to cross a boundary between systems. When you send the C# data to JSON, how do you want to represent null values?

32 comments - Last comment @ 2019-12-23

An Endpoint's Plugin

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-12-10

Heidi is doing some support work and maintenance on a application owned by a government agency. Currently, the work environment is a bit of a bureaucratic nightmare where you can’t do even the mildest code change without going through four hundred layers of paperwork, signoff, and consensus building. This isn’t just normal government stuff- it’s coming straight as a reaction to the previous work done on this project.

Heidi was specifically trying to track down a bug where one of the generated documents was displaying incorrect data. That lead her to this method in their C# web code:

26 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-16

Crank the Volume

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-12-09

When using generic types in a language like Java, nesting generics is a code smell. That is to say, a type like List<Map<String, T>> is probably a sign that you've gone off the path and should rethink how you're structuring your program. Similarly, types that depend on more than one or two generic type parameters are probably a code smell as well.

If those are a "code smell" this code Adam S found is a "code sewage treatment plan in dire need of a visit from the Environmental Protection Agency".

18 comments - Last comment @ 2022-01-04

Failure To Process

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-12-05

Karl supplies us with an unusual bit of code. In the vein of a "true confession", it's code Karl wrote. In the vein of a good WTF, it had to be written like this because of bad choices made earlier in the pipeline.

But the code itself isn't a WTF. It's not good, but… well…

35 comments - Last comment @ 2019-12-17

An Utter Mockery

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-12-03

Today's submitter gave us their name as simply ImminentBurnout. IB works at a company that uses Python and has strong opinions about unit testing. They don't have much understanding to go with those opinions, but they definitely have opinions.

One opinion is that every object- every object must have a stub version to facilitate unit testing. Now, if you're familiar with Python, you know the MagicMock library is built-in in Python 3 and is available as a dependency in 2.7, so problem solved. A MagicMock can act as a stub for every class or method. Plus, it has patching operators to dynamically swap out implementations.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2019-12-05

List Incomprehension

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-12-02

Loads of languages, like Python, have some sort of "comprehension" as a form of syntactic sugar. Instead of doing something awkward like:

my_list = [1, 2, 3, 4]
res = []
for x in my_list:
  res.append(x*x)
# res contains: [1, 4, 9, 16]

20 comments - Last comment @ 2019-12-09