The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Classic WTF: The not-so-efficient StringBuilder

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2019-06-27

As our short summer break continues, this one is from waaaaay back, but it's yet another example of how seemingly simple tasks and seemingly simple data-types can be too complicated sometimes. Original--Remy

The .NET developers out there have likely heard that using a StringBuilder is a much better practice than string concatenation. Something about strings being immutable and creating new strings in memory for every concatenation. But, I'm not sure that this (as found by Andrey Shchekin) is what they had in mind ...

12 comments - Last comment @ 2019-06-28

Classic WTF: Uncovering Nothing

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2019-06-26

As our little summer break continues, we have a tale about Remi (no relation) and a missing stored procedure. Original --Remy

Remi works on one of his country's largest Internet Service Providers, and has the fortune to be on an elite team that focuses on agile development. Or misfortune, depending on how you look at it: at his company, "agile development" actually means "we need that in two weeks".

One of Remi's first assignments was to fix an "emergency" on one of the ATM Addressing systems. Apparently, the application was coming up with incorrect routing data. After a solid day-and-a-half of digging through Visual Basic code that called SQL Server stored procedures which called VB-based COM objects which called more stored procs, Remi found a weird table ("Cal_ATM") that was referenced from an externally-linked database, and the data in that table was completely out of date.

12 comments - Last comment @ 2019-06-27

Classic WTF: Logical Tiers? That Makes No Sense!

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2019-06-24

It's that time of year when we take a short summer break, and that means we reach back into the archives for some classic WTFs that remind us of when things were better. Or worse. So much worse. Today, we find out where checkboxes come from. Original --Remy

Some developers just don't believe in "standards." I should know, I used to work with some of them. They had their own way of doing things, from reinventing the database to changing the web paradigm. I always found it ironic that these folks have a pretty good knowledge of the tools, but could never seem to figure out how to use 'em. Like Chris' predecessor, who seems to have done the equivalent of tightening screws with a voltammeter.

Ok, so I had to port over an ASP app to Coldfusion MX. It was a simple set of search pages so I didn't think it would take too long. Problem was, I couldn't find anywhere in the code where the HTML for one of the select boxes was. Silly me, I should have checked inside the SQL Server stored procedure first! And of course, this is just the tip of iceberg on this site. There were stored procedures that were used to build the actual HTML for the dynamic navigation as well.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-10