The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Code Snippet Of the Day (CodeSOD) features interesting and usually incorrect code snippets taken from actual production code in a commercial and/or open source software projects.

S(adistic)DK

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2011-12-19

Having been a software consultant for the past two decades or so, John wasn’t too worried when his client asked for some help developing against a “fairly niche” vendor SDK (Software Development Kit) for reading genealogy data from various file formats. When his client mentioned the SDK author had gotten the nickname Dinosaur Bob, John just shrugged his shoulders. He had conquered many a SDK in his day, so how bad could Dinosaur Bob’s SDK be?

The first alarms started going off when John tried to use the SDK’s test program to open a sample project. One of the file formats the SDK supported was called TMG, and that format happened to be developed by the very same Dinosaur Bob. It seemed like the logical place to start, so he loaded up the Dinosaur Bob’s TMG software and created a small sample project called simplest.

130 comments - Last comment @ 2013-03-06

Tired of Getting Burned

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2011-12-15

"For the longest time," writes Sasha, "there was only a single Software Engineer IV in the group, and he was known as The Bloviator. If there was a simple solution to a problem, then he'd complicate the problem. If there was a complicated solution to a problem, then he'd complicate the solution even further."

"One trademark style of The Bloviator was his enums. When asked about why he defined his numbers this way, his response was simply: I've seen compilers get literal numbers wrong before. And I'm tired of getting burned."

182 comments - Last comment @ 2012-03-20

The WET Cart

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2011-12-08

The WET Cart

"I help out design firms with 'backend' coding for websites and web applications," writes Josiah, "usually this involves anything that's not HTML/CSS or copy/paste JS."

110 comments - Last comment @ 2013-10-17

The Date Array

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2011-12-05

"When the snow starts falling, that means two things," writes Lee, "there's a bit of a slower commute, and the End of Year bugs start coming out of the woodwork."

"This bug cropped up and took down one of our larger systems when outlooks for 2012 were trying to be prepared."

155 comments - Last comment @ 2011-12-12

Recent CodeSOD

S(adistic)DK

Tired of Getting Burned

The WET Cart

The Date Array