The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Leap to the Past

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-05-08

Early in my career, I had the misfortune of doing a lot of Crystal Reports work. Crystal Reports is another one of those tools that lets non-developer, non-database savvy folks craft reports. Which, like so often happens, means that the users dig themselves incredible holes and need professional help to get back out, because at the end of the day, when the root problem is actually complicated, all the helpful GUI tools in the world can't solve it for you.

Michael was in a similar position as I was, but for Michael, there was a five alarm fire. It was the end of the month, and a bunch of monthly sales reports needed to be calculated. One of the big things management expected to see was a year-over-year delta on sales, and they got real cranky if the line didn't go up. If they couldn't even see the line, they went into a full on panic and assumed the sales team was floundering and the company was on the verge of collapse.

14 comments - Last comment @ 11:24

The Big Pictures

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-05-06

Loading times for web pages is one of the key metrics we like to tune. Users will put up with a lot if they feel like they application is responsive. So when Caivs was handed 20MB of PHP and told, "one of the key pages takes like 30-45 seconds to load. Figure out why," it was at least a clear goal.

Combing through that gigantic pile of code to try and understand what was happening was an uphill battle. Eventually, Caivs just decided to check the traffic logs while running the application. That highlighted a huge spike in traffic every time the page loaded, and that helped Caivs narrow down exactly where the problem was.

17 comments - Last comment @ 01:20

A Double Date

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-05-05

Alice picked up a ticket about a broken date calculation in a React application, and dropped into the code to take a look. There, she found this:

export function calcYears(date) {
  return date && Math.floor((new Date() - new Date(date).getTime()) / 3.15576e10)
}

21 comments - Last comment @ 2025-05-06

Pulling at the Start of a Thread

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-05-01

For testing networking systems, load simulators are useful: send a bunch of realistic looking traffic and see what happens as you increase the amount of sent traffic. These sorts of simulators often rely on being heavily multithreaded, since one computer can, if pushed, generate a lot of network traffic.

Thus, when Jonas inherited a heavily multithreaded system for simulating load, that wasn't a surprise. The surprise was that the developer responsible for it didn't really understand threading in Java. Probably in other languages too, but in this case, Java was what they were using.

10 comments - Last comment @ 2025-05-01

Find the First Function to Cut

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-04-30

Sebastian is now maintaining a huge framework which, in his words, "could easily be reduced in size by 50%", especially because many of the methods in it are reinvented wheels that are already provided by .NET and specifically LINQ.

For example, if you want the first item in a collection, LINQ lets you call First() or FirstOrDefault() on any collection. The latter option makes handling empty collections easier. But someone decided to reinvent that wheel, and like so many reinvented wheels, it's worse.

6 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-30

The Wrong Kind of Character

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-04-29

Today's code, at first, just looks like using literals instead of constants. Austin sends us this C#, from an older Windows Forms application:

if (e.KeyChar == (char)4) {   // is it a ^D?
        e.Handled = true;
        DoStuff();
}
else if (e.KeyChar == (char)7) {   // is it a ^g?
        e.Handled = true;
        DoOtherStuff();
}
else if (e.KeyChar == (char)Keys.Home) {
        e.Handled = true;
        SpecialGoToStart();
}
else if (e.KeyChar == (char)Keys.End) {
        e.Handled = true;
        SpecialGoToEnd();
}

16 comments - Last comment @ 2025-05-03

Objectifying Yourself

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-04-28

"Boy, stringly typed data is hard to work with. I wish there were some easier way to work with it!"

This, presumably, is what Gary's predecessor said. Followed by, "Wait, I have an idea!"

10 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-29

Tangled Up in Foo

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-04-24

DZ's tech lead is a doctor of computer science, and that doctor loves to write code. But you already know that "PhD" stands for "Piled high and deep", and that's true of the tech lead's clue.

For example, in C#:

10 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-25