The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

A Date with Gregory

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-09-30

Calendars today may be controlled by a standards body, but that's hardly an inherent fact of timekeeping. Dates and times are arbitrary and we structure them to our convenience.

If we rewind to ancient Rome, you had the role of Pontifex Maximus. This was the religious leader of Rome, and since honoring the correct feasts and festivals at the right time was part of the job, it was also the standards body which kept the calendar. It was, ostensibly, not a political position, but there was also no rule that an aspiring politician couldn't hold both that post and a political post, like consul. This was a loophole Julius Caesar ruthlessly exploited; if his political opposition wanted to have an important meeting on a given day, whoops! The signs and portents tell us that we need to have a festival and no work should be done!

42 comments - Last comment @ 2025-10-03

Contracting Space

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-09-29

A ticket came in marked urgent. When users were entering data in the header field, the spaces they were putting in kept getting mangled. This was in production, and had been in production for sometime.

Mike P picked up the ticket, and was able to track down the problem to a file called Strings.java. Yes, at some point, someone wrote a bunch of string helper functions and jammed them into a package. Of course, many of the functions were re-implementations of existing functions: reinvented wheels, now available in square.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2025-10-02

High Strung

by Remy Porter in Coded Smorgasbord on 2025-09-25

Most languages these days have some variation of "is string null or empty" as a convenience function. Certainly, C#, the language we're looking at today does. Let's look at a few example of how this can go wrong, from different developers.

We start with an example from Jason, which is useless, but not a true WTF:

24 comments - Last comment @ 2025-10-03

Across the 4th Dimension

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-09-24

We're going to start with the code, and then talk about it. You've seen it before, you know the chorus: bad date handling:

C_DATE($1)
C_STRING(7;$0)
C_STRING(3;$currentMonth)
C_STRING(2;$currentDay;$currentYear)
C_INTEGER($month)

$currentDay:=String(Day of($1))
$currentDay:=Change string("00";$currentDay;3-Length($currentDay))
$month:=Month of($1)
Case of

: ($month=1)
$currentMonth:="JAN"

: ($month=2)
$currentMonth:="FEB"

: ($month=3)
$currentMonth:="MAR"

: ($month=4)
$currentMonth:="APR"

: ($month=5)
$currentMonth:="MAY"

: ($month=6)
$currentMonth:="JUN"

: ($month=7)
$currentMonth:="JUL"

: ($month=8)
$currentMonth:="AUG"

: ($month=9)
$currentMonth:="SEP"

: ($month=10)
$currentMonth:="OCT"

: ($month=11)
$currentMonth:="NOV"

: ($month=12)
$currentMonth:="DEC"

End case

$currentYear:=Substring(String(Year of($1));3;2)

$0:=$currentDay+$currentMonth+$currentYear

15 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-25

One Last ID

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-09-23

Chris's company has an unusual deployment. They had a MySQL database hosted on Cloud Provider A. They hired a web development company, which wanted to host their website on Cloud Provider B. Someone said, "Yeah, this makes sense," and wrote the web dev company a sizable check. They app was built, tested, and released, and everyone was happy.

Everyone was happy until the first bills came in. They expected the data load for the entire month to be in the gigabytes range, based on their userbase and expected workloads. But for some reason, the data transfer was many terabytes, blowing up their operational budget for the year in a single month.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2025-10-01

Identify a Nap

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-09-22

Guy picked up a bug ticket. There was a Hiesenbug; sometimes, saving a new entry in the application resulted in a duplicate primary key error, which should never happen.

The error was in the message-bus implementation someone else at the company had inner-platformed together, and it didn't take long to understand why it failed.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-24

An Echo In Here in here

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-09-18

Tobbi sends us a true confession: they wrote this code.

The code we're about to look at is the kind of code that mixes JavaScript and PHP together, using PHP to generate JavaScript code. That's already a terrible anti-pattern, but Tobbi adds another layer to the whole thing.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-22

Brace Yourself

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2025-09-17

Today's representative line is almost too short to be a full line. But I haven't got a category for representative characters, so we'll roll with it. First, though, we need the setup.

Brody inherited a massive project for a government organization. It was the kind of code base that had thousands of lines per file, and frequently thousands of lines per function. Almost none of those lines were comments. Almost.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-30

Reduced to a Union

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2025-09-16

The code Clemens M supported worked just fine for ages. And then one day, it broke. It didn't break after a deployment, which implied some other sort of bug. So Clemens dug in, playing the game of "what specific data rows are breaking the UI, and why?"

One of the organizational elements of their system was the idea of "zones". I don't know the specifics of the application as a whole, but we can broadly describe it thus:

9 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-17

Functionally, a Date

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-09-15

Dates are messy things, full of complicated edge cases and surprising ways for our assumptions to fail. They lack the pure mathematical beauty of other data types, like integers. But that absence doesn't mean we can't apply the beautiful, concise, and simple tools of functional programming to handling dates.

I mean, you or I could. J Banana's co-worker seems to struggle a bit with it.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-16

The Getter Setter Getter

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-09-11

Today's Java snippet comes from Capybara James.

The first sign something was wrong was this:

5 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-12

Upsert Yours

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-09-10

Henrik H sends us a short snippet, for a relative value of short.

We've all seen this method before, but this is a particularly good version of it:

31 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-17

Pretty Little State Machine

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-09-08

State machines are a powerful way to organize code. They are, after all, one of the fundamental models of computation. That's pretty good. A well designed state machine can make a complicated problem clear, and easy to understand.

Chris, on the other hand, found this one.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-15

Basically, a Smorgasbord

by Remy Porter in Coded Smorgasbord on 2025-09-04

It's that time to take a look at a few short snippets.

Boolean values can hold true or false. But is that truly self documenting? I think we need clearer variable names for this. Certainly, the snippet Nonymous found thinks so:

29 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-16

Adding to the Argument

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-09-03

David G saw a pull request with a surprisingly long thread of comments on it. What was weirder was that the associated ticket was all about adding a single parameter to an existing method. What could be generating that much discussion?

How could adding an argument add to an argument?

6 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-08