The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

What the Hmm?

by Remy Porter in Coded Smorgasbord on 2024-10-22

Our stories come from you, our readers- which, it's worth reminding everyone, keep those submissions coming in. There's nothing on this site without your submissions.

Now, we do get some submissions which don't make the page. Frequently, it's simply because we simply don't have enough context from the submission to understand it or comment on it effectively. Often, it's just not that remarkable. And sometimes, it's because the code isn't a WTF at all.

18 comments - Last comment @ 16:09

Perfect Test Coverage

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-21

When SC got hired, the manager said "unit testing is very important to us, and we have 100% test coverage."

Well, that didn't sound terrible, and SC was excited to see what kind of practices they used to keep them at that high coverage.

23 comments - Last comment @ 13:09

Ancestry Dot Dumb

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-17

Damiano's company had more work than staff, and opted to hire a subcontractor. When hiring on a subcontractor, you could look for all sorts of things. Does their portfolio contain work similar to what you're asking them to do? What's the average experience of their team? What are the agreed upon code quality standards for the contract?

You could do that, or you could hire the cheapest company.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-20

Time to Change

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-16

Dennis found this little nugget in an application he inherited.

function myTime(){
    $utc_str = gmdate("M d Y H:i:s", time());
    $utc = strtotime($utc_str);
    return $utc;
}

17 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-21

An Overloaded Developer

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-15

"Oh, I see what you mean, I'll just write an overloaded function which takes the different set of parameters," said the senior dev.

That got SB's attention. You see, they were writing JavaScript, which doesn't have function overloading. "Um," SB said, "you're going to do what?"

18 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-16

Ripping Away the Mask

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2024-10-14

Jason was investigating a bug in a bitmask. It should have been set to 0b11, but someone had set it to just plain decimal 11. The line responsible looked like this:

byte number = (byte) 11;

25 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-17

Idtoic Mistakes

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-10

Working at a company where the leadership started as technical people has its advantages, but it can also carry costs. Arthur is in one such environment, and while it means that management and labor have a common vocabulary, the company leadership forgets that they're not in a technical role anymore. So they still like to commit code to the project. And that's how things like this happen:

if( this.idtoservice != null )
{
     sOwner = this.idtoservice.Common.Security.Owner;
}
else if( this.idtoservice != null )
{
     sOwner = this.idtoservice.Common.Security.Owner;
}
else if( this.idtoservice != null )
{
     sOwner = this.idtoservice.Common.Security.Owner;
}

14 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-14

JaphpaScript

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-09

Let's say you have a web application, and you need to transfer some data that exists in your backend, server-side, down to the front-end, client-side. If you're a normal person, you have the client do an HTTP request and return the data in something like a JSON format.

You could certainly do that. Or, you could do what Alicia's predecessor did.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-11