The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Take a Moment to Reflect

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-08-02

Modern object-oriented languages tend to support the concept of “reflection”. Reflection lets you inspect an object and find out its methods and invoke them dynamically. If you’re building extensible frameworks where you’re handling objects where their type might not be known until runtime, it can be very useful. On the other hand, if you’re using a strongly typed language and find yourself in this situation frequently… you’re probably doing something wrong.

For that reason, when Adam encounters calls to method.invoke() in Java programs, he gets suspicious. So, when he saw this:

23 comments - Last comment @ 12:26

Super Lag

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2016-08-01

SuperFast Performance Monitoring Systems was an ordinary, average production monitoring company, promising to keep an eye on web traffic and alert customers if they needed to scale up their cloud hardware to match incoming demand. Their core product was simple, straightforward, and solid, doing what it claimed to do without incident ... but it wasn't sexy. Enter Wile E. Coyote, Supergenius Programmer, hereafter called Will for short.

34 comments - Last comment @ 10:48

Quantification of Service

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2016-07-29

"So, do I enter a number 0 to 65,535 or −32,768 to 32,767? What if my experience wasn't an integer? This is a really technical question for applying at a restaurant," writes Brennan.

32 comments - Last comment @ 12:08

Exit Thread

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-07-28

Objects left in the garage or the attic tend to multiply. If you don’t clean them regularly, you find mysterious and inexplicable things have bred like rabbits. “Why is there a bag of marbles in this box, and when did I ever buy an ugly Christmas sweater?”

Without regular refactoring, the same thing can happen to your code-base. Michal is finally taking a look at a bit of code that hasn’t been touched since 2001. The original developer has left the company, there’s no documentation, and the SVN history has long since been discarded.

26 comments - Last comment @ 10:55

The Inner JSON Effect

by TJ Mott in Feature Articles on 2016-07-27

Jake eagerly stepped into his new job, grateful for more experience and new challenges, craving to learn new software stacks and see what his new company had to teach him about the world of software.

They told him he’d be working on some websites, dealing with JavaScript, Node.js, JSON, and the like. It sounded pretty reasonable for web development, except for the non-technical interviewer’s comment that it was all “built on top of Subversion” which he assumed was a simple misunderstanding.

102 comments - Last comment @ 2016-07-31

It's Log, Log, Log

by Ellis Morning in CodeSOD on 2016-07-26

Reader Bernie submits for our approval this wonderful C# log base 2 implementation. He says: “We can distinguish two halves in that code. It looks like it was originally written for an unsigned 16-bit int, and later on extended for signed 32-bit integers.”

52 comments - Last comment @ 2016-07-31

The Missing Source

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2016-07-25

The year was 2006. Nelly Furtado was getting promiscuous, the Winter Olympics were in Italy, and Domino was an application developer for Rocketware, a company that produced multimedia applications. Back then, applications were still commonly distributed on CD-ROMs: small round disks of plastic that contained grooves that could be read by a specialized laser and interpreted as data. This was handy in a period when only 30% of Americans had broadband Internet.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2016-08-01

Wait...Press What?!

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2016-07-22

"Um, I'm not sure the programmers and the engineers were working together on this one," wrote Rob.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2016-07-26