The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The State of Ticketing

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2026-08-17

Developing software can't simply be done with a text editor and a compiler. There are a variety of other tools we have to bring to bear that support our efforts and keep the team organized, like say, source control.

There are certain tools we all have to use that I would argue, nobody has actually make a version that's any good. Build tooling is one of my go-to examples: there are no good build systems, only build systems that are good enough for this task.

18 comments - Last comment @ 15:02

Zero to Zero in 0 seconds

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2026-08-14

"So many zeroes! I'm in." W00H000! Kivi S. "found this ad in the wild. This must be a very large jackpot, look at all those zeroes!"

10 comments - Last comment @ 04:04

Never Eating the Cookie

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-08-13

Maciej works as a freelancer, and that frequently means picking up old PHP code that nobody wants to support.

One project had been lingering for ages with key features missing. Specifically, it was supposed to make HTTP requests to other services on an interval, and use that to populate its data. "The old dev tried, but never got it working." It was Maciej's turn to give it a shot.

13 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-16

Branching Paths

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2026-08-12

"You submitted a pull request."

Indika was, in fact, reviewing the comments she'd gotten on that very same pull request, when her boss, Bill, walked up behind her. What she didn't understand is why Bill said it like it was an accusation.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-14

Public Private Partnership

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-08-11

Eric O was trawling through an API for handling concurrency, and found this little mismatch between the comment and the definition:

/// <summary>
/// private Status, because while this object needs to be able to set the status, consumers should only be able to check it, lest everything break.
/// </summary>
public StatusType Status {
    get {
        return _status;
    }
    set {
        if (value != _status) {
            RaisePropertyChanged("Status");
        }
    }
}

13 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-13

The Crossroads

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2026-08-10

I moved some things around on my calendar. 4:00 PM today is open. Please come to the executive floor.

-Leila

9 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-16

Time Wounds All Heels

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2026-08-07

Looked to the past for some time-traveling entries to round out a themed post. They're 25% fresh.

Robert apparently got a notification of a planned past delivery. It could be just a case of two systems that don't report different time zones, but even so, that's a wtf. Says he: "I just received an email from OnePlus this morning letting me know they have updated the planned delivery date for my order to Yesterday. I guess the delivery driver is going to time travel to get there on time since it still hasn't arrived. "

15 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-13

A More Civilized Age

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2026-08-06

Greta (previously) sends us more updates from her "Ancient Development Environment".

An important task an IDE must do is report build errors to its users. Arguably, that's one of the most important parts. I wouldn't know, I insist on building from the CLI all the time, because IDEs confuse and frighten me. I recognize I'm the weird one here, who is more comfortable in GDB than in a GUI debugger, but this isn't about me, it's about the IDE Greta is using.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-10