The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Mastery Through Repetition

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-05-18

When I was a baby programmer, I subscribed to a computer magazine. In those olden times, these magazines would come with pages of program code, usually BASIC, so that you could type this program into your computer and run it. If you were careful about typos, you could accomplish quite a bit of "programming" without actually programming. What you were doing, in practice, was just typing.

One of Anthony's predecessors was quite the accomplished typist.

15 comments - Last comment @ 12:16

Authentic Mistakes

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-05-17

John's employer needed a small web app built, so someone in management went out and hired a contracting firm to do the work, with the understanding that once it was done, their own internal software teams would do maintenance and support.

Fortunately for John's company, their standard contract included a few well-defined checkpoints, for both code quality audits and security audits. It's the last one that's relevant in this case.

37 comments - Last comment @ 09:36

A MLearning Process

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-05-12

If you go by the popular press articles on the tech field, anyone who's anyone has migrated into the "machine learning" space. That's where all the "smart" programmers go.

Of course, ML is really just statistics and automated model fitting. It's a powerful tool, and it does require some highly specialized skills- skills that might involve programming, but maybe don't quite overlap with programming.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2021-05-17

Getting Funky

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-05-11

When RJ was trawling through some SQL Server stored procedure code, they spotted this line:

IF LEN(LTRIM(RTRIM(@funky_interval))) = 0 SET @funky_interval = NULL

21 comments - Last comment @ 2021-05-14

Javascript Best Practices

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-05-10

For those looking to get into software development, there's never been more access to tutorials, guides, training programs, and communities of developers ready to foster those trying to get started.

Unfortunately, you've got folks that think because they've written a few websites, they're ready to teach others, and write up their own tutorials without having the programming background or the educational background to effectively communicate best practices to the public.

64 comments - Last comment @ 2021-05-15

A Key to Success

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-05-06

Sometimes bad code arises from incompetence, whether individual, or more usually institutional. Sometimes it's overly tight deadlines, misguided architecture. And sometimes… it's just the easiest way.

Naomi writes in to confess to some bad code.

35 comments - Last comment @ 2021-05-12

Touch of Death

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-05-05

Unit testing in C offers its own special challenges. Unit testing an application heavily dependent upon threads, written in C, offers even more.

Brian inherited an application where the main loop of the actual application looked something like:

25 comments - Last comment @ 2021-05-13

A Real Switcheroo

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-05-03

Much of the stories and code we see here are objectively bad. Many of them are bad when placed into the proper context. Sometimes we're just opinionated. And sometimes, there's just something weird that treads the line between being an abuse of code, and almost being smart. Almost.

Nic was debugging some Curses-based code, and found this "solution" to handling arrow key inputs:

21 comments - Last comment @ 2021-05-09

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