The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Only Create Me if I Exist

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-11-05

Foreign keys are an important part of making sure the entities in our relational database can be connected back together and queried correctly. It's part of proper data normalization. This isn't shocking, of course: the order line table has a foreign key over to the products table, so that every line item points to a product we sell. That's database 101. Database 201, you'd also think about the times where you have a hierarchy of records, where say, every Employee has a ManagerId, which is a foreign key back to the Employee table itself (and in database 301, you'll understand why having a ManagerId field is a terrible choice, but that's neither here nor there).

The important thing here is that foreign keys are very common, and foreign keys pointing back to the same table are also very common.

11 comments - Last comment @ 12:19

What it Doesn't Do

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2026-11-04

Alastair found this comment in his codebase, and wondered, "who wrote this comment?" A quick blame answered the question: he did. He did not, however, write the code.

 public function getAllMailers() {
        // This function neither returns Mailers, nor all of them.
        ...
 }

12 comments - Last comment @ 10:04

Death of the Auth-Er

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-11-03

When writing Perl, it's not unusual to want to die. The die function ends your Perl program with an error string, and you'll often see code like: die "My error" unless $i > 5 or die "Other error" if check(), because Perl just loves the backwards conditionals. What's even more fun with die is how it behaves with eval blocks, so it doesn't always kill your program, sometimes it is how you pass error strings back out of sections of your program.

And poor Bobby has inherited some Perl that just really loves to die.

27 comments - Last comment @ 09:02

Get It Now

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-11-02

"TODO" comments are an inescapable part of our work. Yes, yes, you should just do it right the first time, everything should probably have a ticket in whatever your ticket system is for visibility, but at some point, you're just going to leave a "TODO" behind.

But hopefully, the TODO gets TODONE, which is not what happened in Sam C's codebase.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2026-11-04

Oh, K?

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-10-29

Pierre found this cry for help:

 for (j = 0; j < DISTRICT_CARDINALITY; j++) {
    /*
    * A poor way to work around some sort of memory
    * violation.  k gets clobbered, so I buffer l with it.
    * Help?
    */
    for (k = 0, l = 0; k < customers; k++, l++) {
            /* c_id */
            FPRINTF(output, "%d", l + 1);
            METAPRINTF((output, "%c", delimiter));

25 comments - Last comment @ 04:11

Session Recording

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-10-28

We still get a fair bit of old school ASP .Net webforms code, which was cutting edge about twenty years ago, but remains a collection of bad choices that tried to make web programming feel like desktop programming. As an aside, what a reversed world we live in today, where everyone uses Electron and our desktop programming feels like web programming.

In any case, Thomas sends us some pretty ugly webforms code.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2026-11-02

Security Fourth

by Remy Porter in News Roundup on 2026-10-27

A bit ago, I broke with my usual pattern and wrote up some security issues that I felt were particularly funny. It was a change of pace, a different thing, but not a thing that'd become a habit. After all, I'm not a security expert, this isn't a security site, and seriously, what are the odds that suitably funny security issues would crop up again less than a week later?

Well.

9 comments - Last comment @ 2026-11-04

Readable Formats

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2026-10-22

We all love format strings for generating human readable text. Certainly, they're a better choice than string concatenation. Even if I have a blind spot that keeps me from remembering the printf format tokens, I still prefer to use format strings.

Jasmine has a co-worker that does use format strings, but they also miss using string concatenation. So they've found a way to combine them, and avoid the perils of making readable code that describes the format of their text.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2026-10-27