The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Avoiding the dreaded Refresh

by Jake Vinson in Feature Articles on 2005-08-12

Today's WTF is pretty near and dear to me as I still work at the company Alex is talking about. One of the complaints the developers always get (myself included) is that our pages post back to the server and that refreshes look "clunky."

The CMS on our web site is a huge WTF in itself. It never posts back despite there being 7 sections, each with like 15-20 subsections, and each of those with 3 mini sections. You're probably asking yourself how we did it. Well, don't look at me, the code is a giant freaking mess and was developed by the same programmer behind tblCalendar.

62 comments - Last comment @ 2005-08-26

1, 1, or 1, or if you really want, 1

by Jake Vinson in Feature Articles on 2005-08-11

Today's WTF is a never-before-seen, totally 100% new classic that first appeared on the site a few months back.

It's a two-for-one day today that, despite the title, doesn't actually have to do much with ones. Or twos for that matter. No, it's more a case of redundancy in redundant cases. Oy, I'm gonna stop narrating after that one ... here's the first sample from Tristan Harmer

87 comments - Last comment @ 2005-08-25

SqlHtml

by Jake Vinson in Feature Articles on 2005-08-10

Today's classic WTF is an M.C. Escheresque journey into design that just... isn't... right. This is the kind of code you'd expect to see scrawled on the walls of an asylum full of developers. Without futher ado, here's the classic WTF of the day!

SQL XML? Pssh, been there, done that.

84 comments - Last comment @ 2021-07-25

tblCalendar

by Jake Vinson in Feature Articles on 2005-08-09

Jake again, still covering for Alex. Today's classic WTF comes from none other than a egocentric programmer named ME, originally posted a little over a year ago.

I'll be the first one to admit that I'm relatively new to programming. "I'm relatively new to programming." There. So far be it from me to criticize what could well be a masterfully architected piece of software, so I won't color this. I'll just present the facts and let you, the reader, decide if a programmer at my company is stupid.

144 comments - Last comment @ 2005-08-20

Just in case SPACE isn't supported in the future

by Jake Vinson in Feature Articles on 2005-08-08

Jake here, in classic programmer fashion, late on the first update. Anyhoo, we're revisiting some classic WTFs this week while Alex is on vacation or undergoing surgery or whatever he said he was doing. So here's one of my personal favorite WTFs from Scott Elkin for you to read while wishing Alex a happy vacation or speedy recovery.

I'll admit it. When I first came across regular expressions, they seemed a bit intimidating. But, after spending about three or four minutes reading about them I felt a lot more comfortable. Apparently, Scott Elkin's colleague didn't feel like investing those three or four minutes learning regular expressions. Or looping through the individual characters on the string. Well ... at least this way it's all on one line.

73 comments - Last comment @ 2005-08-17