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.

Leap to the Past

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-05-08

Early in my career, I had the misfortune of doing a lot of Crystal Reports work. Crystal Reports is another one of those tools that lets non-developer, non-database savvy folks craft reports. Which, like so often happens, means that the users dig themselves incredible holes and need professional help to get back out, because at the end of the day, when the root problem is actually complicated, all the helpful GUI tools in the world can't solve it for you.

Michael was in a similar position as I was, but for Michael, there was a five alarm fire. It was the end of the month, and a bunch of monthly sales reports needed to be calculated. One of the big things management expected to see was a year-over-year delta on sales, and they got real cranky if the line didn't go up. If they couldn't even see the line, they went into a full on panic and assumed the sales team was floundering and the company was on the verge of collapse.

16 comments - Last comment @ 02:20

The Big Pictures

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-05-06

Loading times for web pages is one of the key metrics we like to tune. Users will put up with a lot if they feel like they application is responsive. So when Caivs was handed 20MB of PHP and told, "one of the key pages takes like 30-45 seconds to load. Figure out why," it was at least a clear goal.

Combing through that gigantic pile of code to try and understand what was happening was an uphill battle. Eventually, Caivs just decided to check the traffic logs while running the application. That highlighted a huge spike in traffic every time the page loaded, and that helped Caivs narrow down exactly where the problem was.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2025-05-08

A Double Date

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-05-05

Alice picked up a ticket about a broken date calculation in a React application, and dropped into the code to take a look. There, she found this:

export function calcYears(date) {
  return date && Math.floor((new Date() - new Date(date).getTime()) / 3.15576e10)
}

21 comments - Last comment @ 2025-05-06

Pulling at the Start of a Thread

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-05-01

For testing networking systems, load simulators are useful: send a bunch of realistic looking traffic and see what happens as you increase the amount of sent traffic. These sorts of simulators often rely on being heavily multithreaded, since one computer can, if pushed, generate a lot of network traffic.

Thus, when Jonas inherited a heavily multithreaded system for simulating load, that wasn't a surprise. The surprise was that the developer responsible for it didn't really understand threading in Java. Probably in other languages too, but in this case, Java was what they were using.

10 comments - Last comment @ 2025-05-01

Recent CodeSOD

Leap to the Past

The Big Pictures

A Double Date

Pulling at the Start of a Thread