The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Tales from the World Cup

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2026-08-31

All I can say in response to our anonymous submitter's story is, ALMOST?!

With the World Cup being hosted in North America this year, I remembered this story that happened back in 2014. At the time I was working in Brazil, for a company that builds software systems for public services. And, with the World Cup being hosted there, in came the opportunity for local agencies to invest in modernization, with pretty much a blank check to get new services, so long as it was deployed before the end of the World Cup. And so the sales people did what they did best, and went around trying to upsell whoever would be willing to buy — no matter our actual capacity for developing the things.

7 comments - Last comment @ 2026-09-01

RCE As a Feature

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2026-08-24

The opposite of meritocracy is kakistocracy: the worst and least-qualified are the ones who rise to the top.

Get real familiar with that word, dear readers. I think you'll need it.

10 comments - Last comment @ 2026-09-01

Floating Along

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2026-08-18

Today's submitter John F. was migrating data from a Microsoft platform to a Microsoft platform, using Microsoft tools. Absolutely nothing could go wrong, right?

Right?

27 comments - Last comment @ 2026-09-09

The State of Ticketing

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2026-08-17

Developing software can't simply be done with a text editor and a compiler. There are a variety of other tools we have to bring to bear that support our efforts and keep the team organized, like say, source control.

There are certain tools we all have to use that I would argue, nobody has actually make a version that's any good. Build tooling is one of my go-to examples: there are no good build systems, only build systems that are good enough for this task.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2026-09-04

Branching Paths

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2026-08-12

"You submitted a pull request."

Indika was, in fact, reviewing the comments she'd gotten on that very same pull request, when her boss, Bill, walked up behind her. What she didn't understand is why Bill said it like it was an accusation.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-14

The Crossroads

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2026-08-10

I moved some things around on my calendar. 4:00 PM today is open. Please come to the executive floor.

-Leila

11 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-28

A More Civilized Age

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2026-08-06

Greta (previously) sends us more updates from her "Ancient Development Environment".

An important task an IDE must do is report build errors to its users. Arguably, that's one of the most important parts. I wouldn't know, I insist on building from the CLI all the time, because IDEs confuse and frighten me. I recognize I'm the weird one here, who is more comfortable in GDB than in a GUI debugger, but this isn't about me, it's about the IDE Greta is using.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-18

Lose Some Padding

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2026-08-03

Flat-file style databases were designed to fit the constraints of the systems they were running on. You specify your schema in terms of "how many characters in a file we use to store this data", meaning something like this: JOHN SMITH 12343rd StAnytown PA12345 is read in my knowing that the first name field is 8 characters wide, the last name field is 8 characters wide, the street number is 4 digits, and so on.

It's also a terrible schema, and woe to anyone with a long name. But many a mainframe had a similar schema.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-04

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