The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Classic WTF: My Many Girlfriends

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2026-07-23

Honestly, with the wildfire smoke and the oppressive heat, maybe it's time to find a nice quiet cave to hang out in. Something with no natural light and no natural ventilation. I wonder if anybody has a place like that… Original. --Remy

In the long ago, wild-west days of the late 90s, there was an expectation that managers would put up with a certain degree of eccentricity from their software developers. The IT and software boom was still new, people didn't quite know what worked and what didn't, the "nerds had conquered the Earth" and managers just had to roll with this reality. So when Barry D gave the okay to hire Sten, who came with glowing recommendations from his previous employers, Barry and his team were ready to deal with eccentricities.

Of course, on the first day, building services came to Barry with some concerns about Sten's requests for his workspace. No natural light. No ventilation ducts that couldn't be closed. And then the co-workers who had interacted with Sten expressed their concerns.

10 comments - Last comment @ 16:16

Wait Longer

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-07-16

Karen was maintaining some specification tests that were flaky. Not extremely flaky, but three or four times out of a thousand, the tests would just fail. The tests were complicated, and some of the operations were timing sensitive, so it wasn't precisely surprising- but the problem was that they were actually generous with their timing windows. The unit tests passed consistently, it was only these functional, specification-based tests that failed.

So, for example, there were sections in the tests where they wanted to wait at least 2ms. Since the code and tests were in TypeScript, they used the setTimeout function, which per standard JavaScript documentation warns that it may wait longer. But again, Karen was fine with longer.

11 comments - Last comment @ 2026-07-18

The Error Check

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-07-15

Today's submission is less a WTF and more a, "Yeah, that'd annoy me too."

Stevie works in a code-base that's largely C, which means function return values are usually used to communicate to status codes. The standard:

32 comments - Last comment @ 2026-07-22

AAYFN

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-07-14

Jason M sends us some Ruby code.

def bv(prop, tv="Yes", fv="No", nv="Not Specified")
  v = self.send(prop)
  if v === true
    tv
  elsif v === false
    fv
  else
    nv
  end
 end

17 comments - Last comment @ 2026-07-16

Flushed Out

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2026-07-09

While a project manager is frequently called upon for their planning ability, the real skill we want from project managers is their ability to communicate. The job of a project manager is to align the team doing the work, with the organization goals driving the work, with the management and leadership teams trying to understand the work, while juggling all the constraints like budgets, timelines, and the endlessly changing expectations for the project. A good project manager is worth their weight in gold. A bad one will cost their weight in gold.

Mark was hired on as a contractor, reporting to Tegan. Tegan was fresh out of business school, complete with an MBA and a variety of project-management training certifications. Unfortunately for Mark and the rest of the team, and especially unfortunately for Tegan, she had absolutely no real world experience. To make matters worse, this wasn't just a software project: they were working on a system which matched newly developed software with newly designed mechanics and custom build control electronics. A group of experienced software engineers, mechanical engineers, and electrical engineers all found themselves reporting to a bright and shiny MBA. It's a role that she probably could have grown into, but management saw all the acronyms she continuously put after her name, and decided she could just take the whole thing over with no real guidance.

10 comments - Last comment @ 2026-07-10

Module Test

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-07-08

TJ inherited a NestJS project. The original developers left the team many years ago, but they've left their mark in the codebase.

// ProjectsModule.ts
@Module({
  controllers: […],
  providers: […],
  exports: […],
})
export class ProjectsModule {}

9 comments - Last comment @ 2026-07-12

On Hold

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-07-07

"Dragoncoder" supports a web application that has a "wait time" for access. I hate that that's a thing, but I recognize that there are real-world constraints where this might make sense. Still, I hate it. But that's not the WTF.

      var minutes = parseInt( 12 , 10);
      var time = document.getElementById('waitTime');

      if ( minutes < 2) {
        time.innerText = "Your estimated wait time is 12 minute."
      } else if (minutes < 60) {
        time.innerText = "Your estimated wait time is 12 minutes."
      } else if (minutes === 60) {
        time.innerText = "Your estimated wait time is 0 hour."
      } else if (minutes < 120 && (minutes % 60 === 1)) {
        time.innerText = "Your estimated wait time is 0 hour and 12 minute."
      } else if (minutes < 120) {
        time.innerText = "Your estimated wait time is 0 hour and 12 minutes."
      } else if (minutes > (60 * 4)) {
        time.innerText = "Your estimated wait time is more than 4 hours."
      } else if (minutes % 60 === 0) {
        time.innerText = "Your estimated wait time is 0 hours."
      } else {
        time.innerText = "Your estimated wait time is 0 hours and 12 minutes."
      }

28 comments - Last comment @ 2026-07-09

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.

13 comments - Last comment @ 2026-07-10