The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Best of 2020: The Time-Delay Footgun

by Remy Porter in Best of… on 2020-12-29

As we revisit the best articles of 2020, have you been wondering why 2020 has been such a… colorful year? Maybe the developer responsible wrote a bad version check. Original --Remy

A few years back, Mike worked at Initech. Initech has two major products: the Initech Creator and the Initech Analyzer. The Creator, as the name implied, let you create things. The Analyzer could take what you made with the Creator and test them.

For business reasons, these were two separate products, and it was common for one customer to have many more Creator licenses than Analyzer licenses, or upgrade them each on a different cadence. But the Analyzer depended on the Creator, so someone might have two wildly different versions of both tools installed.

11 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-26

Classic WTF: Developer Carols

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-12-24

It's the holiday season, which means over the next few days, we'll be reviewing some of the best of 2020, if anything about 2020 can be considered "the best", and maybe some other surprises. To kick things off, we're going to pull from the faroff year of Christmas 2017, and return to our Developer Carols. That year, we ran them too late to go caroling, and this year, nobody outside of New Zealand should be going caroling, keeping with our tradition of meeting the requirements but delivering absolutely no value. (Original)

It’s Christmas, and thus technically too late to actually go caroling. Like any good project, we’ve delivered close enough to the deadline to claim success, but late enough to actually be useless for this year!

Still, enjoy some holiday carols specifically written for our IT employees. Feel free to annoy your friends and family for the rest of the day.

Push to Prod (to the tune of Joy To the World)

6 comments - Last comment @ 2020-12-25

What the Fun Holiday Activity: A Visit From "Coding Cats"?

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2020-12-23

Thanks again to everyone who submitted a holiday tale for our What the Fun Holiday special. Like all good holiday traditions, our winner indulges in a bit of nostalgia for a Christmas classic, by adapting the classic "A Visit From St. Nicolas", a trick we've done ourselves. But like a good WTF, Lee R also mixes in some frustration and anger, and maybe a few inside jokes that we're all on the outside of. Still, for holiday spirit, this tale can't be beat.

Now, our normal editorial standards avoid profanity, but in the interests of presenting the story as Lee submitted it, we're going to suspend that rule for today. It is, after all, the holidays, and we're all miserable.

8 comments - Last comment @ 2023-08-21

What the Fun Holiday Activity: The Gift of the Consultant and The Holiday Push

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2020-12-22

As we roll into the last few days before Christmas, it's time to share what our readers sent in for our "What the Fun Holiday" contest. It was a blast going through the submissions to see what our holiday experiences looked like.

Before we dig in to our contest winners, our first honorable mention is to David N, who shared with us "The Worm Before Christmas", a classic from 1988 that was new to us.

10 comments - Last comment @ 2020-12-30

All About the Details

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-12-21

Dora's AngularJS team (previously) wanted to have their display be "smart" enough to handle whether or not you were editing a list of "Users" or just one "User", so they implemented a function to turn a plural word into a singular word.

Which, of course, we already know the WTF implementation of it: they just chop off the last letter. So "Potatoes" becomes "Potatoe", "Moose" becomes the noise cows make, and I'm just left saying "oh, gees". But they managed to make it worse than that.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2021-07-26

All the Angles

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-12-17

Web frameworks are a double edged sword. They are, as a rule, bloated, complicated, opinionated and powerful. You can get a lot done, so long as you stick to the framework's "happy path", and while you can wander off and probably make it work, there be dragons. You also run into a lot of developers who, instead of learning the underlying principles, just learn the framework. This means they might not understand broader web development, but can do a lot with Angular.

And then you might have developers who don't understand broader web development or the framework they're using.

12 comments - Last comment @ 2020-12-21

Stringing Your Date Along

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-12-16

One of the best parts of doing software development is that you're always learning something new. Like, for example, I thought I'd seen every iteration on bad date handling code. But today, I learned something new.

Katharine picked up a pile of tickets, all related to errors with date handling. For months, the code had been running just fine, but in November there was an OS upgrade. "Ever since," the users complained, "it's consistently off by a whole month!" This was a bit of a puzzle, as there's nothing in an OS upgrade that should cause date strings to be consistently off by a whole month. Clearly, there must be a bug, but why did it only now start happening? Katharine pulled up the C code, and checked.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2020-12-17

Drop into the Deep End

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-12-15

Would you like to guarantee your project ends up on this site? Antoon's employer has a surefire technique. First, hire a freshly graduated architect with no programming experience. Second, chuck them into a project in a programming language they don't know. Third, give them absolutely no supervision and no guidance or support, and watch what happens.

<?php
function copy_tables($table1, $table2, $copy, $size, $link, $action, $testOper)
{
	global $link; //global so we can retrieve it in the fuction "update"
	global $result;
	global $timezone;

	$result[1] = $copy;

	if ($size = 'EXIST')
	{
		$queryz0 = "drop table if exists $table1";

		$requestz0 = db_query($queryz0, $link) or error_log("copy_tables *** $table1 : Error in the execution of request z0", db_error() , $action, $testOper) . "\n";

		if ($result[1] == "error")
		{
			exit;
		}

		$queryz1 = "create table $table1 LIKE $table2";

		$requestz1 = db_query($queryz1, $link) or error_log("copy_tables *** $table1 : Error in the execution of request z1", db_error() , $action, $testOper) . "\n";

		if ($result[1] == "error")
		{
			exit;
		}

	}
	elseif ($size = 'NOTEXIST')
	{
		$queryz2 = "create table if not exists $table1 LIKE $table2";

		$requestz2 = db_query($queryz2, $link) or error_log("copy_tables *** $table1 : Error in the execution of request z2", db_error() , $action, $testOper) . "\n";

		if ($result[1] == "error")
		{
			exit;
		}
	}

	$queryz3 = "insert $table1 select * from $table2";

	$requestz3 = db_query($queryz3, $link) or error_log("copy_tables *** $table1 : Error in the execution of request z3", db_error() , $action, $testOper) . "\n";

	if ($result[1] == "error")
	{
		exit;
	}
}
?>

25 comments - Last comment @ 2021-03-08

Count on Me

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-12-14

There is no task so simple that a developer can't find a harder, more wasteful, and pointless way to do it. For example, let's say you want to know how many rows are in a data grid object?

Hans found this C# snippet in production a few years ago:

46 comments - Last comment @ 2021-01-06

The Secret is… … … … Timing

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2020-12-10

Scott was new to the team, and so when a seemingly simple bug came in, he picked up the ticket. It should be an easy win, and help him get more familiar with the code base.

The reported problem was that a user entered the time, and saved it. Several screens later, when that time was redisplayed, it was incorrect, off by some number of hours. Clearly, it was a small timezone issue, which should be easy to fix.

32 comments - Last comment @ 2021-04-11

Passive Regressions

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-12-09

Sometimes, our readers send us a story. Sometimes they send us some bad code. Sometimes, they just need a place to vent their frustrations. Paul T had some frustrations. Paul's team is migrating from .Net to .NetCore, and as one might imagine, that creates a lot of build failures.

Their Team City build environment sometimes doesn't give the most helpful messages:

26 comments - Last comment @ 2020-12-15

Going with the Flow

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-12-08

The power of a good devops team is that you can get fast, reliable, and repeatable deployments. It lays out a foundation for rapid iteration and quick releases. With that in mind, Lakeisha was pretty excited to start a new job working in devops.

She walked in the door, with visions of well architected, scripted flows, robust automated testing, and strict architectural guidelines. About fifteen minutes in, she learn that FISI guided their entire devops workflow. If it worked, it worked.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2020-12-11

WWJSD?

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-12-03

A few months ago, Lee was reviewing a pull request from Eddie. Eddie was a self-appointed "rockstar" developer. Eddie might be a "junior" developer in job title, but they're up on the latest, greatest, bestest practices, and if everyone would just get out of Eddie's way, the software would get so much better.

Which is why the pull request Lee was looking at touched nearly every file. Every change was some variation of this:

31 comments - Last comment @ 2021-11-30

A Tight Fitter

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-12-01

Part of the pitch of Python is that it's a language which values simplicity and ease of use. Whether it lives up to that pitch is its own discussion, but the good news is that if you really want to create really complex code with loads of inheritance and nasty interrelationships, you can.

Today's anonymous submitter started out by verifying some of the math in some extremely math-y analytical code. Previously, they'd had problems where the documentation and the code were subtly different, so it was important that they understood exactly what the code was doing.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2020-12-12