The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Maximum Max

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-04-19

Imagine you were browsing a C++ codebase and found a signature in a header file like this:

int max (int a, int b, int c, int d);

16 comments - Last comment @ 14:08

Constantly Counting

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-04-15

Steven was working on a temp contract for a government contractor, developing extensions to an ERP system. That ERP system was developed by whatever warm bodies happened to be handy, which meant the last "tech lead" was a junior developer who had no supervision, and before that it was a temp who was only budgeted to spend 2 hours a week on that project.

This meant that it was a great deal of spaghetti code, mashed together with a lot of special-case logic, and attempts to have some sort of organization even if that organization made no sense. Which is why, for example, all of the global constants for the application were required to be in a class Constants.

26 comments - Last comment @ 07:03

The Truth and the Truth

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-04-14

When Andy inherited some C# code from a contracting firm, he gave it a quick skim. He saw a bunch of methods with names like IsAvailable or CanPerform…, but he also saw that it was essentially random as to whether or not these methods returned bool or string.

That didn't seem like a good thing, so he started to take a deeper look, and that's when he found this.

13 comments - Last comment @ 08:36

A Form of Reuse

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-04-13

Writing code that is reusable is an important part of software development. In a way, we're not simply solving the problem at hand, but we're building tools we can use to solve similar problems in the future. Now, that's also a risk: premature abstraction is its own source of WTFs.

Daniel's peer wrote some JavaScript which is used for manipulating form inputs on customer contact forms. You know the sorts of forms: give us your full name, phone number, company name, email, and someone from our team will be in touch. This developer wrote the script, and offered it to clients to enhance their forms. Well, there was one problem: this script would get embedded in customer contact forms, but not all customer contact forms use the same conventions for how they name their fields.

33 comments - Last comment @ 2021-04-18

Exceptionally General

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-04-12

Andres noticed this pattern showing up in his company's code base, and at first didn't think much of it:

25 comments - Last comment @ 2021-04-15

A True Leader's Enhancement

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-04-08

Chuck had some perfectly acceptable C# code running in production. There was nothing terrible about it. It may not be the absolute "best" way to build this logic in terms of being easy to change and maintain in the future, but nothing about it is WTF-y.

if (report.spName == "thisReport" || report.spName == "thatReport")
{
  LoadUI1();
}
else if (report.spName == "thirdReport" || report.spName == "thirdReportButMoreSpecific")
{
  LoadUI2();
}
else
{
  LoadUI3();
}

26 comments - Last comment @ 2021-04-12

We All Expire

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-04-07

Code, like anything else, ages with time. Each minor change we make to a piece of already-in-use software speeds up that process. And while a piece of software can be running for decades unchanged, its utility will still decline over time, as its user interface becomes more distant from common practices, as the requirements drift from their intent, and people forget what the original purpose of certain features even was.

Code ages, but some code is born with an expiration date.

20 comments - Last comment @ 04:11

He Sed What?

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-04-06

Today's code is only part of the WTF. The code is bad, it's incorrect, but the mistake is simple and easy to make.

Lowell was recently digging into a broken feature in a legacy C application. The specific error was a failure when invoking a sed command from inside the application.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2021-04-14

Switching Your Template

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-04-05

Many years ago, Kari got a job at one of those small companies that lives in the shadow of a university. It was founded by graduates of that university, mostly recruited from that university, and the CEO was a fixture at alumni events.

Kari was a rare hire not from that university, but she knew the school had a reputation for having an excellent software engineering program. She was prepared to be a little behind her fellow employees, skills-wise, but looked forward to catching up.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2021-04-08

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