The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Every Day

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-20

There are real advantages to taking a functional programming approach to expressing problems. Well, some problems, anyway.

Kevin sends us this example of elegant, beautiful functional code in C#:

13 comments - Last comment @ 12:16

The Right Helper

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-19

Greg was fighting with an academic CMS, and discovered that a file called write_helper.js was included on every page. It contained this single function:

function document_write(s)
{
   document.write(s);
}

10 comments - Last comment @ 03:45

The Mask Service

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-18

Gretchen saw this line in the front-end code for their website and freaked out:

let bucket = new AWS.S3({ params: { Bucket: 'initech-logos' } });

13 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-19

Walking the DOGE

by Remy Porter in News Roundup on 2025-02-17

One thing I've learned by going through our reader submissions over the years is that WTFs never start with just one mistake. They're a compounding sequence of systemic failures. When we have a "bad boss" story, where an incompetent bully puts an equally incompetent sycophant in charge of a project, it's never just about the bad boss- it's about the system that put the bad boss in that position. For every "Brillant" programmer, there's a whole slew of checkpoints which should have stopped them before they went too far.

With all that in mind, today we're doing a news roundup about the worst boss of them all, the avatar of Dunning-Kruger, Elon Musk. Because over the past month, a lot has happened, and there are enough software and IT related WTFs that I need to talk about them.

78 comments - Last comment @ 11:33

Dash It All

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-02-14

Because we still have the NWS, I learned that "A winter storm will continue to bring areas of heavy snow and ice from the Great Lakes through New England today into tonight." I'm staying put, and apparently so is Dave L.'s delivery driver.

Dave L. imagines the thoughts of this driver who clearly turned around and headed straight home. "Oh, d'ya mean I've got to take these parcels somewhere!? in this weather!? I can't just bring them back?"

15 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-19

Double Checking

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-13

Abdoullah sends us this little blob of C#, which maybe isn't a full-on WTF, but certainly made me chuckle.

if (file!= null)
{
  if (file.name.StartsWith(userName))
  {
    if (file.name.StartsWith(userName))
    {
      url = string.Format(FILE_LINK, file.itemId, file.name);
      break;
    }
  }
}

21 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-14

Finally, a Null

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-02-12

Eric writes:

Yes, we actually do have code reviews and testing practices. A version of this code was tested successfully prior to this version being merged in, somehow.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-13

Simplest Implementation

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2025-02-11

As the saying goes, there are only two hard problems in computer science: naming things, cache invalidations, and off by one errors. Chris's predecessor decided to tackle the second one, mostly by accurately(?) naming a class:

class SimpleCache
{
}

16 comments - Last comment @ 2025-02-13