The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Every Day

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-20

There are real advantages to taking a functional programming approach to expressing problems. Well, some problems, anyway.

Kevin sends us this example of elegant, beautiful functional code in C#:

18 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-21

The Right Helper

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-19

Greg was fighting with an academic CMS, and discovered that a file called write_helper.js was included on every page. It contained this single function:

function document_write(s)
{
   document.write(s);
}

10 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-20

The Mask Service

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-18

Gretchen saw this line in the front-end code for their website and freaked out:

let bucket = new AWS.S3({ params: { Bucket: 'initech-logos' } });

13 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-19

Walking the DOGE

by Remy Porter in News Roundup on 2025-02-17

One thing I've learned by going through our reader submissions over the years is that WTFs never start with just one mistake. They're a compounding sequence of systemic failures. When we have a "bad boss" story, where an incompetent bully puts an equally incompetent sycophant in charge of a project, it's never just about the bad boss- it's about the system that put the bad boss in that position. For every "Brillant" programmer, there's a whole slew of checkpoints which should have stopped them before they went too far.

With all that in mind, today we're doing a news roundup about the worst boss of them all, the avatar of Dunning-Kruger, Elon Musk. Because over the past month, a lot has happened, and there are enough software and IT related WTFs that I need to talk about them.

79 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-21

Double Checking

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-13

Abdoullah sends us this little blob of C#, which maybe isn't a full-on WTF, but certainly made me chuckle.

if (file!= null)
{
  if (file.name.StartsWith(userName))
  {
    if (file.name.StartsWith(userName))
    {
      url = string.Format(FILE_LINK, file.itemId, file.name);
      break;
    }
  }
}

21 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-14

Finally, a Null

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-12

Eric writes:

Yes, we actually do have code reviews and testing practices. A version of this code was tested successfully prior to this version being merged in, somehow.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-13

Simplest Implementation

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2025-02-11

As the saying goes, there are only two hard problems in computer science: naming things, cache invalidations, and off by one errors. Chris's predecessor decided to tackle the second one, mostly by accurately(?) naming a class:

class SimpleCache
{
}

16 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-13

On Deep Background

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-10

Andrew worked with Stuart. Stuart was one of those developers who didn't talk to anyone except to complain about how stupid management was, or how stupid the other developers were. Stuart was also the kind of person who would suddenly go on a tear, write three thousand lines of code in an evening, and then submit an pull request. He wouldn't respond to PR comments, however, and just wait until management needed the feature merged badly enough that someone said, "just approve it so we can move on."

int iDisplayFlags = objectProps.DisplayInfo.BackgroundPrintFlags;

bool bForceBackgroundOn = false;
bool bForceBackgroundOff = false;

// Can't use _displayTypeID because it will always be 21 since text displays as image
if (_fileTypeID == 11) // TEXT
{
    if ((iDisplayFlags & 0x1008) != 0) // Text Background is required
    {
        bForceBackgroundOn = true;
    }
    else if ((iDisplayFlags & 0x1001) != 0) // Text Background is not available
    {
        bForceBackgroundOff = true;
    }
}
else if (_displayTypeID == 21) // IMAGE
{
    if ((iDisplayFlags & 0x1200) != 0) // Image Background is required
    {
        bForceBackgroundOn = true;
    }
    else if ((iDisplayFlags & 0x1040) != 0) // Image Background is not available
    {
        bForceBackgroundOff = true;
    }
}

bool useBackground = bForceBackgroundOn;

// If an object does not have an Background and we try to use it, bad things happen.
// So we check to see if we really have an Background, if not we don't want to try and use it
if (!useBackground && objectProps.DisplayInfo.Background)
{
    useBackground = Convert.ToBoolean(BackgroundShown);
}

if (bForceBackgroundOff)
{
    useBackground = false;
}

19 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-12

Not Exactly Gems

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-06

Sammy's company "jumped on the Ruby on Rails bandwagon since there was one on which to jump", and are still very much a Rails shop. The company has been around for thirty years, and in that time has seen plenty of ups and downs. During one of those "ups", management decided they needed to scale up, both in terms of staffing and in terms of client base- so they hired an offshore team to promote international business and add to their staffing.

A "down" followed not long after, and the offshore team was disbanded. So Sammy inherited the code.

13 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-11

Whitespace: A Frontier

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2025-02-05

Tim has been working on a large C++ project which has been around for many, many years. It's a tool built for, in Tim's words, "an esoteric field", and most of the developers over the past 30 years have been PhD students.

This particular representative line is present with its original whitespace, and the original variable names. It has been in the code base since 2010.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-12

Device Detection

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-04

There are a lot of cases where the submission is "this was server side generated JavaScript and they were loading constants". Which, honestly, is a WTF, but it isn't interesting code. Things like this:

if (false === true)
{
	// do stuff
}

23 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-12

No Limits on Repetition

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-03

Just because you get fired doesn't mean that your pull requests are automatically closed. Dallin was in the middle of reviewing a PR by Steve when the email came out announcing that Steve no longer worked at the company.

Let's take a look at that PR, and maybe we can see why.

8 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-05