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Do we need better verb tenses to describe a counterfactual present from the future perspective? Any trained linguists in the audience, please helped out.
Reinier B. will wonder "Does this mean my cloud storage plan never expires? Or does it expire every day at noon? It's an obvious phishing mail though."
Doreann has touched this particular function many, many times. In all those times, she never noticed this particular little line, dropped in by a third-party contractor that has long since cashed their check and wandered off to other things.
Dec 25(user?.betaMode || !user?.betaMode) && (specialRuleCode())
Today's anonymous submitter sends us some C# code. This particular block of code controls whether two different columns are visible on the screen. If the field Dist_Por equals one set of constants, we display one column, if it equals a different constant, we display the other. Seems simple enough.
My question to you is this: how many nested ternaries do you need to solve this problem?
I recognize that our comments system here leaves much to be desired, especially with regards to the spam filter. Lots of good comments get moderated, an annoying quantity of spam gets through. But today, I want to take a moment to talk about some of the spam we get. Because we get a lot. And since most of you never see it as most of it hits our moderation queue, I don't think you can appreciate how weird some of the spam we get is. Formatting preserved, but links- where they were present- stripped.
We'll start with one of my "favorites", the sycophant:
Today we return to Jessica (previously), who still suffers under Windows Forms. But it's not all Windows Forms. There's also random CLI tools kicking around. CLI tools which should really be designed to run as a service,
Let's start with the Main method of this particular tool.
Never let it be said that we at TDWTF dish it out and can't take it.
Morgan immediately dished "I'm not sure what date my delivery will arrive but I will {PlanToBeAtHomeWhenItDoes}. "
Grace sends us, in her words, "the function that validates the data from the signup form for a cursed application."
It's more than one function, but there are certainly some clearly cursed aspects of the whole thing.
Grace was tracking down some production failures, which put her on the path to inspecting a lot of URLs in requests. And that put her onto this blob of code:
app.get(
(
[
"/api/ddm/getProjectList",
":dueDate",
":status",
":userAssignedId",
":managerID",
":clientID",
":projectHeaderID",
":tagId",
":companyId",
":clientGroup",
":isDefault",
":dateRange",
":dateToFilter",
":tagIds",
":statusIds",
":repeatValues",
":engagementID?",
":completionDate?"
]
.join( "/" )
),
ddmDboardCtrl.getProjectList
);
Last week's out of order logging reminded Adam R of a similar bug he encountered once.
The log files looked like this:
There's something about hierarchical arrangements that makes top-down interference utterly irresistible to many managers and executives. Writers may also experience similar strife with their editors, a phenomenon Robert Heinlein described with the perfect metaphor: "After he pees in it himself, he likes the flavor much better."
Sometimes, a leader leverages their hard-won wisdom and experience to steer a project onto a better path. But, all too often, someone's imagined wisdom and starving ego force a perfectly good train off the rails.
"Zero balance due now!" shouted davethepirate "To be fair, I had disputed a charge on a bill and they finally relented which should have actually resulted in them owing me $1.01, but I'm happy with the win." I'm sure yarr.
Matthias sends us what he calls the "tern of the century". Which, before I share it with you: bad news, it's just a regular bad ternary. But it remains bad in interesting ways, so it's definitely worth talking about. But let's not oversell it.
private static String getOrderTypeCode(CreateOrderRequest order) {
return !StringUtils.isBlank(order.getOrderParams().getReceivingCompanyFoo()) && ORDR_TP_DQQ_FOO.equals(order.getOrderParams().getOrderType()) ? ORDR_TP_DQQ_BAR_CDE : order.GetOrderParams().getOrderType().getOrderTypeCode();
}
Philipp H was going through some log files generated by their CI job to try and measure how long certain steps in the process took. He took the obvious path of writing code to read the logfiles, parse out the timestamps, and then take the difference between them.
Everything worked fine, until for certain steps, a negative timestamp was reported:
Today we have a true confession from Carl W. It has the benefit of being in R, which means that at a glance, I just assume "eh, looks fine to me." I guess I'm turning into Jimbo.
But let's dig into it. Carl's first snippet is this:
Over the past few months, Ellis has been sharing the challenges of the modern job hunt. As I'm one week into my new gig, after a weird and protracted search, I thought I'd add my two cents, because kids: it's nasty out there, for sure.
So, for starters, I wrapped up my time working on space robots, and have shifted over to farm robots. That's right, I'm a farmer now. While it may be less glamorous, the business prospects, and thus the prospects of continued employment, are better. That said, I'm working with a startup so I wouldn't say it's all that safe. Still, good change for now, and maybe I'll talk a bit more about what that's like at some point. But that's not where I want to focus today.
This week's episode is brought to you by the number two.
"Two Error'ds in two months from these guys!" exclaim'd Thad H. Frist was this, about which Thad snarked "Canada got rid of the penny years ago. I guess the 407ETR took that literally."
Frequent contributor Argle Bargle (recently, or even in last week's Errord) works with a programmer called "Jimbo". Jimbo is a solid co-worker and a good programmer. He has more tenure at the company than Argle, which means Jimbo is who Argle goes to when he has questions.
Recently, Argle worked his way through a rather complicated bit of code. It involved passing data between two different languages inside of a real-time system. Much of its functionality was opaque and complicated, so Argle wrote literal paragraphs of documentation explaining what the code did, how to invoke it, what the gotchas might be, and how to avoid them.
Ever feel like it'd all fall to pieces if you so much as turned your head? In the comments section of our article seeking your seasonal horror stories, Wayne shared a holiday WTF of a different sort that's too good not to share:
Not a holiday problem, but a me being on holiday problem.
It's common to see code in the form of if (false == true). We get a fair bit of it in our inbox, and we generally don't post it often, because, well, it's usually just a sign that someone generated the code. There's a WTF in that, somewhere, but there's not much to say about the code, beyond, "Don't generate code, pass data from backend to frontend instead."
But Nicholas sends us one that shows a little more of interest in it.
During the holiday season, we got some of your holiday WTFs. For the next few weeks, we'd love to see your New Year's Resolutions. Maybe ones for you- what WTF do you do that you want to stop doing? But mostly, we're looking for the resolutions you want to give other people- the teammate who microwaves salmon for lunch everyday (it's healthy protein bro), the pointy-haired-boss who thinks they can code because ChatGPT generates code, the company that thinks CI is too much of an expense. What in your day or workplace needs to take on a resolution for this year?
We know 2026 is not a leap year. But how do we know that? We need to call some function to find out.
Steve sends us a bit of representative code; on it's own, it's not so bad, but with the broader context, it's horrifying:
For the first Error'd of the future-facing year, we return to our most-hated pattern of every prior year. Namely, broken password mechanisms. Meanwhile, on a personal note, I'm sitting at a boarding gate behind a planeload of people who were scheduled on a flight 12 hours ago! Sure, first-world problems but hoo boy.
"I'll get on that right away" snapped longtime contributor Argle Bargle. "I needed to make a helpdesk request. For some reason they think I need to update my password. Sure, I can appreciate that it's been a while since I've made any password change. The only catch is, I've only been with the company six months."
The market's been rough out there this year, and this "from the trenches" recap of the challenges is useful for everyone to review as we go into 2026. Original. --Remy
Ellis knew she needed a walk after she hurried off of Zoom at the end of the meeting to avoid sobbing in front of the group.
She'd just been attending a free online seminar regarding safe job hunting on the Internet. Having been searching since the end of January, Ellis had already picked up plenty of first-hand experience with the modern job market, one rejection at a time. She thought she'd attend the seminar just to see if there were any additional things she wasn't aware of. The seminar had gone well, good information presented in a clear and engaging way. But by the end of it, Ellis was feeling bleak. Goodness gracious, she'd already been slogging through months of this. Hundreds of job applications with nothing to show for it. All of the scams out there, all of the bad actors preying on people desperate for their and their loved ones' survival!