The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

A Bracing Way to Start the Day

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2025-03-27

Barry rolled into work at 8:30AM to see the project manager waiting at the door, wringing her hands and sweating. She paced a bit while Barry badged in, and then immediately explained the issue:

Today was a major release of their new features. This wasn't just a mere software change; the new release was tied to major changes to a new product line- actual widgets rolling off an assembly line right now. And those changes didn't work.

17 comments - Last comment @ 17:38

Time for Identification

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2025-03-26

If you need a unique ID, UUIDs provide a variety of options. It's worth noting that variants 1, 2, and 7 all incorporate a timestamp into the UUID. In the case of variant 7, this has the benefit of making the UUID sortable, which can be convenient in many cases (v1/v2 incorporate a MAC address which means that they're sortable if generated with the same NIC).

I bring this up because Dave inherited some code written by a "guru". Said guru was working before UUIDv7 was a standard, but also didn't have any problems that required sortable UUIDs, and thus had no real reason to use timestamp based UUIDs. They just needed some random identifier and, despite using C#, didn't use the UUID functions built in to the framework. No, they instead did this:

15 comments - Last comment @ 12:44

Tern Down a Date

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2025-03-25

Today's anonymous submitter has managed to find a way to do date formatting wrong that I don't think I've seen yet. That's always remarkable. Like most such bad code, it checks string lengths and then adds a leading zero, if needed. It's not surprising, but again, it's all in the details:

// convert date string to yyyy/MM/DD
return dtmValue.Year + "-" + ((dtmValue.Month.ToString().Length == 1)?  ("0" + dtmValue.Month.ToString()): dtmValue.Month.ToString()) + "-" + ((dtmValue.Day.ToString().Length == 1)? ("0" + dtmValue.Day.ToString()): dtmValue.Day.ToString());

17 comments - Last comment @ 09:14

The Rounding Error

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2025-03-24

At one point, someone noticed that some financial transactions weren't summing up correctly in the C# application Nancy supported. It didn't require Superman or a Peter Gibbons to figure out why: someone was using floating points for handling dollar amounts.

That kicked off a big refactoring project to replace the usage of double types with decimal types. Everything seemed to go well, at least until there was a network hiccup and the application couldn't connect to the database. Let's see if you can figure out what happened:

18 comments - Last comment @ 2025-03-25

Over Extended Methods

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2025-03-20

Jenny had been perfectly happy working on a series of projects for her company, before someone said, "Hey, we need you to build a desktop GUI for an existing API."

The request wasn't the problem, per se. The API, on the other hand, absolutely was.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2025-03-20

Reliability Test

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-03-19

Once upon a time, Ryan's company didn't use a modern logging framework to alert admins when services failed. No, they used everyone's favorite communications format, circa 2005: email. Can't reach the database? Send an email. Unhandled exception? Send an email. Handled exception? Better send an email, just in case. Sometimes they go to admins, sometimes they just go to an inbox used for logging.

Let's look at how that worked.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2025-03-23

Spaced Out Prefix

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-03-18

Alex had the misfortune to work on the kind of application which has forms with gigantic piles of fields, stuffed haphazardly into objects. A single form could easily have fifty or sixty fields for the user to interact with.

That leads to C# code like this:

16 comments - Last comment @ 2025-03-25

Don't Date Me

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-03-13

I remember in some intro-level compsci class learning that credit card numbers were checksummed, and writing basic functions to validate those checksums as an exercize. I was young and was still using my "starter" credit card with a whopping limit of $500, so that was all news to me.

Alex's company had a problem processing credit cards: they rejected a lot of credit cards as being invalid. The checksum code seemed to be working fine, so what could the problem be? Well, the problem became more obvious when someone's card worked one day, and stopped working the very next day, and they just so happened to be the first and last day of the month.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2025-03-19