The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Classic WTF: The Shadow over ShipPoint

by Dan J. in Feature Articles on 2017-11-24

What's this? A re-run of a spooky article on the day after Thanksgiving? Well, what's spookier than Black Friday? --Remy
Original

In the winter of 2012-13, I was fired from the ill-rumored e-commerce company known as ShipPoint. Though I remained stalwart to the end, the wretched darkness embodied in ShipPoint's CTO and his twisted worshipers dogs me still, a malignant growth choking the very life out of my career aspirations. And although I fight every day to forget, to leave my time at ShipPoint behind, I still awaken in the uttermost black of night, shuddering, my mind wrenching itself free from nightmare's grip. I record this grim history only because I fear I may soon slip irredeemably into madness.

It was 2011 when, freshly downsized, I found myself wandering the LinkedIn Jobs Directory, seemingly in vain. I had almost made up my mind to hang out my shingle as a consultant when I received an email from a recruiter. I don't remember his name, nor the firm that he claimed to represent, only that he demanded that we meet in person; apparently he was privy to a lucrative opportunity whose details could only be revealed face to face. While suspicious, I must admit I was gripped by curiosity — tinged, I must now believe, with a touch of the wild. I met the recruiter, a grim, swarthy fellow of furtive glance and questionable heritage, in a refuse-choked alley far from the central business district. It was there, amidst the dumpsters and commercial-grade recycling bins, that I first heard in a grating croak the name whose syllables I would one day shudder to write.

41 comments - Last comment @ 2017-12-15

Best of 2015: Once You Eliminate the Impossible…

by Dan J. in Best of… on 2015-12-29

This article, from April had a problem, so they decided to use XML. Now they have An error occurred while parsing EntityName. Line 7, position 32. -- Remy

Once you eliminate the impossible…

20 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-03

No Changes Please

by Dan J. in Feature Articles on 2015-08-27

A new codebase at a new job is a lot like a new relationship: everything’s great until you really get to know each other. Just ask Bradley, who joined Javatechsoft Industries a few months ago. He was brought on to lend a hand with an overdue project. The pay was good, the job came with life insurance, and he had plenty of experience with Enterprise Java. It seemed like the perfect fit.

137 comments - Last comment @ 2015-09-10

Save Yourselves!

by Dan J. in CodeSOD on 2015-08-03

Scott K was cleaning up a configuration utility used by his team when he dredged up this sanity-threatening artifact:

void Save(string path)
{  
    XmlTextWriter write = null;  
    try
    {  
        write = new XmlTextWriter(path, null);
    }  
    catch (IOException)
    {  
        write.WriteEndDocument();  
        write.Close();  
        try
        {
            write = new XmlTextWriter(path, null);
        }  
        catch (IOException)
        {
            return;
        }
    }  
 // Write stuff to the file
}

17 comments - Last comment @ 2015-08-03

Brillance is in the Eye of the Beholder

by Dan J. in Feature Articles on 2015-07-20

“E-commerce” just doesn’t have the ring it once did. The best-qualified hackers in the world used to fall all over themselves to work on the next Amazon or eBay, but now? A job maintaining the back-end of an online store isn’t likely to lure this generation’s rockstar ninja coderz, which explains why Inicart ended up hiring Jay.

As far as Colleen could tell, her boss had been trying to add a developer to their team for at least a year. Scott was always on his way to interviews, second interviews, phone screens, and follow-up Skype calls… but summer turned to autumn turned to Christmas, and Inicart’s dev team returned from the holidays to find only their waistbands had increased in size. But then came the day Colleen walked in to find the long-empty cubicle next to hers brimming with a brand-new task chair and workstation. She ran down the hall.

39 comments - Last comment @ 2015-07-21

We All Float Down Here…

by Dan J. in CodeSOD on 2015-06-29

When Maarten first saw the utility function below, he couldn’t imagine why converting a number from float to double required a string intermediate. Fortunately, whoever wrote this code followed best practices: their comment not only explained what the code is doing, it also explained why.

Pennywise in the sewer

80 comments - Last comment @ 2020-11-02

Paying Cache for Insurance

by Dan J. in Feature Articles on 2015-06-16

If you asked the web developers at XYZ Insurance, a mere network engineer like Billy had no business snooping around in their code. “He probably doesn’t even know what HTML stands for,” they’d sneer, and they kept sneering until a routine change to fulfill an audit requirement brought their internal website grinding to a halt.

This article is actually about a health insurance company, but they don’t generally have cute CGI mascots

99 comments - Last comment @ 2015-06-18

The Bureaucracy is Expanding…

by Dan J. in Feature Articles on 2015-05-12

Government Department prided itself on the precision of its process and procedures. Every function in the organization had its functionary, at least in theory. Joe had only been on the job a month when he discovered that figuring out which functionary would actually function wasn’t as easy as it looked. The Department used a database known as CAS to track all its financial data, including wages and work orders. Since Joe intended to earn wages in return for coordinating those work orders, he was going to need access to CAS. His first inkling that there might be a problem with the pervasive process was that, despite all employees needing at least basic CAS access for the payroll system, it wasn’t until his fourth week with the department that Terry, his team lead, gave him the good news.

59 comments - Last comment @ 2015-05-14