The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Modular Dependencies

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2023-10-04

Many years ago, Valts and his spouse both worked for the same company. The company had an ERP system that started its life as a product back when ERP systems were novel and new. It was written in Delphi, and it was huge- so huge that the company needed to hack the Delphi linker to handle its size.

Well, their company got swallowed up by Initech, and after the buyout, things changed. Valts left, and a few years later so did his spouse. But they kept in touch with their colleagues, so it was over dinner that former co-worker Viktorija related the recent disaster she had stumbled across.

16 comments - Last comment @ 20:49

Teaching Programming

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2023-10-03

Gracie had a friend who was interested in becoming a teacher. To get admitted into a teaching program at the local university, the friend needed to take an admissions test, to prove they were teaching material.

Said friend tried to retrieve their test results, and the page glitched out. Gracie, who was handy, offered to see if she could identify the problem- likely an ad-blocker extension or something was breaking a script. A few minutes in the browser debugging tools, however, showed that the script came pre-broken.

21 comments - Last comment @ 17:02

Easy Reader Version

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2023-10-02

Ensuring you code is readable is arguably one of the most important things you can do after ensuring it is correct. The real question is: readable to whom? Because apparently, some people have odd ideas about readability. Like Evan's co-worker.

/* dlgAdvanced.vb */
Me.btn1.Text = "Yes to All"
Me.btn1.DialogResult = Windows.Forms.DialogResult.Yes And Windows.Forms.DialogResult.Ignore ''Easy Readability, but the real value is 4 (DialogResult.Retry)

19 comments - Last comment @ 2023-10-03

Default Actions

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2023-09-28

Bleu supports a Pimcore-based PHP site. Pimcore is a rather sprawling enterprise system for PHP. Like many Model-View-Controller type frameworks, maps HTTP requests to actions on controllers. Bleu's team has several "default" actions configured on their controllers. Let's take a look at a few of them.

public function searchAction()
{
  // TODO: replace with actual search
  // instead of static page showing all important subpages.
}

11 comments - Last comment @ 2023-10-03

A Single Bug

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2023-09-27

Matt's team had a party after their last release. It was a huge push, with tons of new features, that came at the end of many months of work. On the Monday after the party, they came back into work for unsurprising bad news: nothing is perfect, so there were several issues and defects that needed to be patched, quickly.

Since QA is the team responsible for signing off and approving any work, QA is the team that also owns the defect tickets. Matt and his team can't do any work without a ticket, which meant they spent almost an entire day knowing there were bugs to fix, but without any idea of what bugs to fix.

39 comments - Last comment @ 2023-09-30

Picking Your Consultants

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2023-09-26

Inilock started making locks back in the 1880s, and has always had a conservative approach to changing things about how locks work. But the world has moved on, and the pin-and-tumbler has given way to RFID card readers and electromagnets.

Since Inilock didn't have the internal expertise to build industrial locking systems for commercial customers, they did what any company would do: they hired highly paid consultants. The project started in 2018. These consultants went out and build a lock firmware platform, a server, and a homegrown TCP protocol to handle configuration and setup, handed it in late and over budget, cashed their checks, and vanished, by 2022.

31 comments - Last comment @ 2023-09-28

Roll On Menu

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2023-09-25

Mike was refactoring an old web application written in Perl. We joke about Perl being a "write only language," but the original developer wanted to take that unreadable attitude to the JavaScript front-end portion of the application.

function setup() {
  position('m1',46,220);
  position('m1g',33,200);
  position('m1c',33,200);
  position('m2',46,330);
  position('m2g',33,310);
  position('m2c',33,310);
// ... snip 50 lines
}

22 comments - Last comment @ 2023-09-29

Succesful Deployment

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2023-09-21

Typos are the bane of delevopers' existence. For most of our typos, the result is a syntax error. It's quick and easy to find and fix. But any time we're working with strings (or in languages where variables are declared at use) there can be many more subtle bugs.

So when Abigail's company sent an intern off to fix a few typos, they thought this was a lovely little low-hanging fruit bug to fix.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2023-10-02