The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Springs are Optional

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2025-08-28

Optional types are an attempt to patch the "billion dollar mistake". When you don't know if you have a value or not, you wrap it in an Optional, which ensures that there is a value (the Optional itself), thus avoiding null reference exceptions. Then you can query the Optional to see if there is a real value or not.

This is all fine and good, and can cut down on some bugs. Good implementations are loaded with convenience methods which make it easy to work on the optionals.

28 comments - Last comment @ 11:31

The HTML Print Value

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-08-27

Matt was handed a pile of VB .Net code, and told, "This is yours now. I'm sorry."

As often happens, previous company leadership said, "Why should I pay top dollar for experienced software engineers when I can hire three kids out of college for the same price?" The experiment ended poorly, and the result was a pile of bad VB code, which Matt now owned.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2025-08-30

Not What They Meant By Watching "AndOr"

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2025-08-26

Today's awfulness comes from Tim H, and while it's technically more than one line, it's so representative of the code, and so short that I'm going to call this a representative line. Before we get to the code, we need to talk a little history.

Tim's project is roughly three decades old. It's a C++ tool used for a variety of research projects, and this means that 90% of the people who have worked on it are PhD candidates in computer science programs. We all know the rule of CompSci PhDs and programming: they're terrible at it. It's like the old joke about the farmer who, when unable to find an engineer to build him a cow conveyer, asked a physicist. After months of work, the physicist introduced the result: "First, we assume a perfectly spherical cow in a vacuum…"

10 comments - Last comment @ 2025-08-28

A Countable

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2025-08-21

Once upon a time, when the Web was young, if you wanted to be a cool kid, you absolutely needed two things on your website: a guestbook for people to sign, and a hit counter showing how many people had visited your Geocities page hosting your Star Trek fan fiction.

These days, we don't see them as often, but companies still like to track the information, especially when it comes to counting downloads. So when Justin started on a new team and saw a download count in their analytics, he didn't think much of it at all. Nor did he think much about it when he saw the download count displayed on the download page.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2025-08-22

Copy of a Copy of a

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-08-20

Jessica recently started at a company still using Windows Forms.

Well, that was a short article. Oh, you want more WTF than that? Sure, we can do that.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2025-08-22

I Am Not 200

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-08-19

In theory, HTTP status codes should be easy to work with. In the 100s? You're doing some weird stuff and breaking up large requests into multiple sub-requests. 200s? It's all good. 300s? Look over there. 400s? What the hell are you trying to do? 500s? What the hell is the server trying to do?

This doesn't mean people don't endlessly find ways to make it hard. LinkedIn, for example, apparently likes to send 999s if you try and view a page without being logged in. Shopify has invented a few. Apache has added a 218 "This is Fine". And then there's WebDAV, which not only adds new status codes, but adds a whole bunch of new verbs to HTTP requests.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2025-08-26

Going Crazy

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-08-18

For months, everything at Yusuf's company was fine. Then, suddenly, he comes in to the office to learn that overnight the log exploded with thousands of panic messages. No software changes had been pushed, no major configurations had happened- just a reboot. What had gone wrong?

This particular function was invoked as part of the application startup:

15 comments - Last comment @ 2025-08-19

An Array of Parameters

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-08-14

Andreas found this in a rather large, rather ugly production code base.

private static void LogView(object o)
{
    try
    {
        ArrayList al = (ArrayList)o;
        int pageId = (int)al[0];
        int userId = (int)al[1];

        // ... snipped: Executing a stored procedure that stores the values in the database
    }
    catch (Exception) { }
}

17 comments - Last comment @ 2025-08-15

Raise VibeError

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-08-13

Ronan works with a vibe coder- an LLM addicted developer. This is a type of developer that's showing up with increasing frequency. Their common features include: not reading the code the AI generated, not testing the code the AI generated, not understanding the context of the code or how it integrates into the broader program, and absolutely not bothering to follow the company coding standards.

Here's an example of the kind of Python code they were "writing":

12 comments - Last comment @ 2025-08-18

Round Strips

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-08-12

JavaScript is frequently surprising in terms of what functions it does not support. For example, while it has a Math.round function, that only rounds to the nearest integer, not an arbitrary precision. That's no big deal, of course, as if you wanted to round to, say, four decimal places, you could write something like: Math.floor(n * 10000) / 10000.

But in the absence of a built-in function to handle that means that many developers choose to reinvent the wheel. Ryan found this one.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2025-08-13

A Single Lint Problem

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-08-11

We've discussed singleton abuse as an antipattern many times on this site, but folks keep trying to find new ways to implement them badly. And Olivia's co-worker certainly found one.

We start with a C++ utility class with a bunch of functions in it:

18 comments - Last comment @ 2025-08-13

Divine Comedy

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2025-08-07

"Code should be clear and explain what it does, comments should explain why it does that." This aphorism is a decent enough guideline, though like any guidance short enough to fit on a bumper sticker, it can easily be overapplied or misapplied.

Today, we're going to look at a comment Salagir wrote. This comment does explain what the code does, can't hope to explain why, and instead serves as a cautionary tale. We're going to take the comment in sections, because it's that long.

10 comments - Last comment @ 2025-08-14

A Dropped Down DataSet

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-08-06

While I frequently have complaints about over-reliance on Object Relational Mapping tools, they do offer key benefits. For example, mapping each relation in the database to a type in your programming language at least guarantees a bit of type safety in your code. Or, you could be like Nick L's predecessor, and write VB code like this.

For i As Integer = 0 To SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows.Count - 1
     Try 'Handles DBNull
         Select Case SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(0)
             Case "Bently" 'Probes
                 Probes_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim)
             Case "Keyphasor"
                 Keyphasor_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim)
             Case "Transmitter"
                 Transmitter_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim)
             Case "Tachometer"
                 Tachometer_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim.ToUpper.ToString.Trim)
             Case "Dial Therm"
                 DialThermometer_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim)
             Case "DPS"
                 DPS_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim)
             Case "Pump Bracket"
                 PumpBracket_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim)
             Case "Accelerometer"
                 Accelerometer_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim)
             Case "Velometer"
                 Velometer_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim)
         End Select
     Catch
         'MessageBox.Show(text:="Error during SetModelNums().", _
         '                caption:="Error", _
         '                buttons:=MessageBoxButtons.OK, _
         '                icon:=MessageBoxIcon.Error)
     End Try
Next

18 comments - Last comment @ 2025-08-13

An Annual Report

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-08-05

Michael has the "fun" task of converting old, mainframe-driven reports into something more modern. This means reading through reams of Intelligent Query code.

Like most of these projects, no one has a precise functional definition of what it's supposed to do. The goal is to replace the system with one that behaves exactly the same, but is more "modern". This means their test cases are "run the two systems in parallel and compare the outputs; if they match, the upgrade is good."

19 comments - Last comment @ 2025-08-09

Concatenated Validation

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-08-04

User inputs are frequently incorrect, which is why we validate them. So, for example, if the user is allowed to enter an "asset ID" to perform some operation on it, we should verify that the asset ID exists before actually doing the operation.

Someone working with Capybara James almost got there. Almost.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2025-08-07