The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

What the Hmm?

by Remy Porter in Coded Smorgasbord on 2024-10-22

Our stories come from you, our readers- which, it's worth reminding everyone, keep those submissions coming in. There's nothing on this site without your submissions.

Now, we do get some submissions which don't make the page. Frequently, it's simply because we simply don't have enough context from the submission to understand it or comment on it effectively. Often, it's just not that remarkable. And sometimes, it's because the code isn't a WTF at all.

18 comments - Last comment @ 16:09

Perfect Test Coverage

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-21

When SC got hired, the manager said "unit testing is very important to us, and we have 100% test coverage."

Well, that didn't sound terrible, and SC was excited to see what kind of practices they used to keep them at that high coverage.

23 comments - Last comment @ 13:09

Friday On My Mind

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2024-10-18

The most common type of submission Error'd receives are simple, stupid, data problems on Amazon. The text doesn't match the image, the pricing is goofy, or some other mixup that are just bound to happen with a database of zillions of products uploaded by a plethora of barely-literate mountain village drop-shippers.

So I don't usually feature them, preferring to find something with at least a chance of being a creative new bug.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-21

Ancestry Dot Dumb

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-17

Damiano's company had more work than staff, and opted to hire a subcontractor. When hiring on a subcontractor, you could look for all sorts of things. Does their portfolio contain work similar to what you're asking them to do? What's the average experience of their team? What are the agreed upon code quality standards for the contract?

You could do that, or you could hire the cheapest company.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-20

Time to Change

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-16

Dennis found this little nugget in an application he inherited.

function myTime(){
    $utc_str = gmdate("M d Y H:i:s", time());
    $utc = strtotime($utc_str);
    return $utc;
}

17 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-21

An Overloaded Developer

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-15

"Oh, I see what you mean, I'll just write an overloaded function which takes the different set of parameters," said the senior dev.

That got SB's attention. You see, they were writing JavaScript, which doesn't have function overloading. "Um," SB said, "you're going to do what?"

18 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-16

Ripping Away the Mask

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2024-10-14

Jason was investigating a bug in a bitmask. It should have been set to 0b11, but someone had set it to just plain decimal 11. The line responsible looked like this:

byte number = (byte) 11;

25 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-17

You Don't Need A Weatherman

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2024-10-11

...to know which way the wind blows. This week, it's been an ill one. Two of our readers sent us references to the BBC's reports on unusual weather in Bristol - one from the web, and one mobile. Maybe that will help you deduce the source of this error.

Frist, Graham F. shared a screenshot of the beeb's mobile app, bellowing "I know Milton is hitting the US hard right now but that's nothing compared to the 14,000 mph winds here!"

23 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-13