The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

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

0 comments - Last comment @ -none-

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.

17 comments - Last comment @ 03:10

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.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-23

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

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

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

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