The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

What Condition is This

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-05-28

Untodesu sends us this submission, with this comment:

Literally no idea what kind of drugs the guy was taking but nonetheless we've rewritten it to be just a two-liner

10 comments - Last comment @ 16:26

Are There Files Yet?

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-05-27

Are there any files to send? That's the question that Chris C's predecessor had. So they asked it. Again. And again. And again.

Chris writes:

16 comments - Last comment @ 08:50

Classic WTF: One-and-a-Half-Tiered Application Design

by Jake Vinson in CodeSOD on 2026-05-25

It's a holiday in the US today, so we're reaching back into the archives. What we really need is a single function that can do it all, and by "it" we mean "ruin your life." Original --Remy

There are several types of bad code; there's lazy code, frantic code, unaware-of-a-better-way code, and aware-of-a-better-way-but-too-apathetic-to-do-it code, to name a few. Then there're amalgamations of different types of bad code.

Môshe encountered such an amalgam when his company was trying out a new delivery service. Môshe spent some time evaluating the IE-only web interface, and was curious about some JavaScript errors he was getting. Strangely, he noticed variables named dateSQL, newSQLTag, and modeSQL.

6 comments - Last comment @ 2026-05-25

In the Know

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-05-21

Delilah works in a Python shop. Despite Python's "batteries included" design, that doesn't stop people from trying to make their own batteries from potatoes. For example, her co-worker wrote this function:

def key_exists(element, key):
    if isinstance(element, dict):
        try:
            element = element[key]
        except KeyError:
            return False
        return True

7 comments - Last comment @ 2026-05-26

Find a Bar for This One

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-05-20

A depressing quantity of software is what I would call a "data pump". I have some data over here, and I need it over there. Maybe I'm integrating into a legacy app. Or into an ERP. Or into a 3rd party API. At the end of the day, I have data in one place, and I want it in another place.

Sally has a Java application written in the Quarkus framework, which has a nightly batch that works to keep a table of Bar entities in sync with a table of Foo entities. (This anonymization comes from Sally) These exist in the same database. There is also a Bar webservice, which provides information about the Bar entities. The workflow, such as it is, is that the software needs to find all of the Foo entities that do not currently have associated Bar entities, and then call the Bar webservice to get the required information to create those Bar entities.

12 comments - Last comment @ 2026-05-27

Over and Under Reaction

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-05-13

Today's anonymous submitter sends us two blocks. The first is a perfectly normal line of React code:

const [width, setWidth] = useState(false)

15 comments - Last comment @ 2026-05-17

Failing to Fail

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-05-07

Russell F (previously) sends us a small one today. It's not just a representative line, it's a representative comment. More than that, it's a true confession. Russell wrote some code, you see, and the logic was confusing. So, a co-worker added a comment to explain what the code was doing:

'This is *supposed* to fail. If it fails to fail, it throws a failure message

14 comments - Last comment @ 2026-05-16

Please Find, Rewind

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-05-06

As previously discussed, C++ took a surprisingly long time to get a "starts with" function for strings. It took even longer to get a function called "contains". In part, that's simply because string::find solves that problem.

Nancy sends us a… different approach to solving this problem.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2026-05-09

Not for Nullthing

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-05-05

Today's anonymous submitter sends us some code that just makes your mind go… blank when you look at it.

	public static boolean isNull(String value) {
		return StringUtils.isBlank(value);
	}

16 comments - Last comment @ 2026-05-15

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