The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Serial Problems

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2020-10-26

If we presume there is a Hell for IT folks, we can only assume the eternal torment involves configuring or interfacing with printers. Perhaps Anabel K is already in Hell, because that describes her job.

Anabel's company sells point-of-sale tools, including receipt printers. Their customers are not technical, so a third-party installer handles configuring those printers in the field. To make the process easy and repeatable, Anabel maintains an app which automates the configuration process for the third party.

37 comments - Last comment @ 2021-03-18

Slow Load

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2020-10-13

After years spent supporting an enterprisey desktop application with a huge codebase full of WTFs, Sammy thought he had seen all there was to be seen. He was about to find out how endlessly deep the bottom of the WTF barrel truly was.

10 comments - Last comment @ 2020-10-20

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by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2020-10-08

Content management systems are… an interesting domain in software development. On one hand, they’re one of the most basic types of CRUD applications, at least at their core. On the other, it’s the sort of problem domain where you can get 90% of what you need really easily, but the remaining 10% are the cases that are going to make you pull your hair out.

Which is why pretty much every large CMS project supports some kind of plugin architecture, and usually some sort of marketplace to curate those plugins. That kind of curation is hard, writing plugins tends to be more about “getting the feature I need” and less about “releasing a reliable product”, and thus the available plugins for most CMSes tend to be of wildly varying quality.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2020-10-14

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