The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Classic WTF: Difficult Personality

by Remy Porter in Best of… on 2026-07-06

As the US took this weekend to celebrate their complicated relationship with tyranny, we reach back through the archives for another story of tyrants. If you think about it, the Declaration of Independence is basically the same thing as quitting without notice. Original --Remy

It was Steve's first week on the job, and he had plenty of questions about the code base and the new features he was supposed to implement. He muddled through for most of the week, but Friday morning he hit a brick wall and needed to talk to Bill, the architect.

"Can I meet with you for like an hour to go over things?" Steve asked.

9 comments - Last comment @ 20:58

The Most Dangerous Game

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-07-02

While we talk about bad video game code periodically, we generally avoid it because it's so specialized and while something like fast inverse square root is bad code from a maintainability perspective, it's great code for abusing floating points to make math fast.

Işıtan Yıldız sends us a snippet from a game's config file. I won't pick on the specific game, but this isn't some random build of TuxCart, but a released game sold on multiple platforms. It's from a small team, but it's an actual professional product running on many devices. What's notable about this is the game has multiplayer elements, which means networking code, which means…

13 comments - Last comment @ 2026-07-05

A Specific Key

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2026-07-01

Today's anonymous submission isn't really a WTF, but it highlights the hardest problem in computer science: naming things.

For example, let's say you saw a method called handleRSAPrivateKeyGeneration. You'd likely assume that it generates an RSA private key. More specifically, it accepts a request for a private key and handles that request. It's right there in the name.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2026-07-05

Off the Path

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-06-29

File path separators are a common pain point when writing cross platform software. Of course, not every programming language has a graceful API for handling that. For example, prior to C++ 17, you had to do some #ifdef preprocessor magic to handle that. Which people usually did (or they'd use the Boost suite of libraries).

Code like this wouldn't be out of place or incorrect:

36 comments - Last comment @ 2026-07-02

The Roadmap

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2026-06-25

When Gary was called in for a meeting with a few of his managers- because of course he had several- he thought it was going to be for an "attaboy", because things had been going really well for the past few months.

Gary had inherited a mess, and taken over a nightmare application. It was the kind of application that should be a simple CRUD-style data-driven app, but somehow despite only having 20ish entities it managed, someone had generated 500+ controllers for managing them. Most of those controllers were copy/pasted code with minor changes in the WHERE clause of a SQL query.

29 comments - Last comment @ 22:34

Authorized Logger

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-06-24

Gretchen's company recently got purchased by Initech. Specifically, they were bought for their dev team, of all things. They had a few software products that were high performers, and Initech wanted that secret sauce. They bought the company, and then split the dev team up and migrated the developers to new products.

That actually worked out okay for Gretchen, most of the time. For a few projects, the dev team was given some requirements and a free hand to figure out how to deliver them. They were free to reuse code that existed or rewrite entirely, based on their own judgement. They were free to pick the tools they wanted to use, and the results worked out well.

5 comments - Last comment @ 2026-07-04

Do a Lot to Do Nothing

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-06-23

Today's anonymous submitter works in finance. I'll let them start the introduction:

This is a legacy application that has been running for nearly a decade in production so one could say that it's been thoroughly tested by daily production use and nothing needs changing

12 comments - Last comment @ 2026-06-29

When False is True

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-06-22

Lillith was integrating some new tools into an existing Ruby on Rails API. The existing API allowed you to send a dry_run flag along with the request, so that you could have the service calculate its changes without applying them.

The problem was, the new tool Lillith was integrating could send, in the body of the request, {"dry_run": false}, but the service would see it as true. Consistently.

7 comments - Last comment @ 2026-06-22