The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

You Talkin' to Me?

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-09-19

The Beast In Black is back with a simple but silly factual error on the part of the gateway to all (most) human knowledge.

4 comments - Last comment @ 01:12

An Echo In Here in here

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-09-18

Tobbi sends us a true confession: they wrote this code.

The code we're about to look at is the kind of code that mixes JavaScript and PHP together, using PHP to generate JavaScript code. That's already a terrible anti-pattern, but Tobbi adds another layer to the whole thing.

13 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-18

Brace Yourself

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2025-09-17

Today's representative line is almost too short to be a full line. But I haven't got a category for representative characters, so we'll roll with it. First, though, we need the setup.

Brody inherited a massive project for a government organization. It was the kind of code base that had thousands of lines per file, and frequently thousands of lines per function. Almost none of those lines were comments. Almost.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-18

Reduced to a Union

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2025-09-16

The code Clemens M supported worked just fine for ages. And then one day, it broke. It didn't break after a deployment, which implied some other sort of bug. So Clemens dug in, playing the game of "what specific data rows are breaking the UI, and why?"

One of the organizational elements of their system was the idea of "zones". I don't know the specifics of the application as a whole, but we can broadly describe it thus:

9 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-17

Functionally, a Date

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-09-15

Dates are messy things, full of complicated edge cases and surprising ways for our assumptions to fail. They lack the pure mathematical beauty of other data types, like integers. But that absence doesn't mean we can't apply the beautiful, concise, and simple tools of functional programming to handling dates.

I mean, you or I could. J Banana's co-worker seems to struggle a bit with it.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-16

Free Birds

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-09-12

"These results are incomprensible," Brian wrote testily. "The developers at SkillCertPro must use math derived from an entirely different universe than ours. I can boast a world record number of answered questions in one hour and fifteen minutes somewhere."

12 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-16

The Getter Setter Getter

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-09-11

Today's Java snippet comes from Capybara James.

The first sign something was wrong was this:

5 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-12

Upsert Yours

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-09-10

Henrik H sends us a short snippet, for a relative value of short.

We've all seen this method before, but this is a particularly good version of it:

31 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-17