The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Lock 'Em Dead

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-08-26

Kevin sends us an exception handler from C++. Let's see if we can spot what's going wrong:

catch (Exception::Deadlock)
{
   retry;
}

20 comments - Last comment @ 18:02

Both Ways Bug Me

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2026-08-25

There are many cases where some sort of debugging block sneaks by, especially cases where we see preprocessors or templates working, which leave us with nonsense like if (true == false) running in production. But Codemonkey found a new twist on that sort of thing, in a SQL query being run in production.

WHERE (some conditions) AND (1 = 0 OR (1 = 1 AND (other conditions)))

7 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-25

We All Register This

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2026-08-20

Today's maybe more of a "representative data sheet entry" than anything else.

Every developer has the experience of reading the documentation. If you've been at this for some time, you've probably read bad documentation. Documentation that is incomplete, inaccurate, or otherwise flawed. Or, my personal favorite, the brief time where Oracle tried to put all of its documentation into an Adobe Flex site (aka, a Flash application, not a real web app). That one had fun bonus features, like "breaking copy and paste" and "preventing you from deep linking to a piece of the documentation".

21 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-24

Back to the Lab

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-08-19

Matlab is special. Scientists and researchers love it. Programmers hate it, and not just because it uses 1-based arrays. I've worked on a number of projects where the task was "take this Matlab code and convert it to C so we can run it on an embedded CPU". Somehow, in that process, I've avoided learning much about Matlab.

Andre works on a team that uses Matlab to manage experimental scenarios. They wanted to do a simple task: generate a set of participant-specific images, store them in a database, and reference them later. Somewhere in the intersection of the database product they were using, the Matlab license they had, and other constraints, they discovered that there simply was no good way to do this.

9 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-20

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.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-22

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.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-24

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