The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

A Tool for You

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-10-07

A junior dev on the team had a simple question: in Java, how do I correctly read user input from the CLI and act on it?

Now, we can wonder about a junior dev not having such basic knowledge, but maybe they're new to Java specifically. Who knows. But Robert's team has a senior on it who "likes to mentor". This senior has strong opinions about how to write software, extreme confidence in those opinions, and has somehow been around the company long enough that he knows where the bodies are buried and no one will fire him.

4 comments - Last comment @ 08:50

A Random Article

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-10-06

Many years ago, DJ got his start doing odd web development jobs for a low hourly rate. He was only 19 when he got started, and what he lacked in experience he made up for in being cheap to hire.

As I said, that was many years ago, and he has since learned a lot. But he still has some code from his very first "someone paid me for this" project. This particular function needed to pick a random bit of content from their database to display in the "right side" banner area. This is how DJ implemented it.

14 comments - Last comment @ 05:26

The Date and Time and Time

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-10-05

Today's anonymous submitter sends us some legacy Java code.

The task is this: check what time it is. And fortunately, even in the older Java datetime libraries that were terrible, this was an easy task. You just needed to do something like new Date(), which constructs a date time object set to the current time. getTime() picks off just the time portion.

9 comments - Last comment @ 2026-10-06

Very Valid Tokens

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-10-01

Today's anonymous submitter shares with us the function their company uses to validate authentication tokens.

public bool IsTokenValid(string token)
{
    //TODO
    return true;
}

17 comments - Last comment @ 2026-10-03

Quite a Distance from the Right Solution

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-09-30

Fritz's team needed to see if one point was within a certain distance from a center point. You or I would likely try and answer this question using a simple distance calculation, since that's the question we're trying to answer. But what if you didn't understand distances at all? Then you could write this little piece of genius.

        private bool IsWithin(Point point, int radius)
        {
            for (int x = -radius; x < radius + 1; x++)
            {
                for (int y = -radius; y < radius + 1; y++)
                {
                    if ((PositionX == point.X + x) && (PositionY == point.Y + y))
                        return true;
                }
            }

            return false;
        }

25 comments - Last comment @ 2026-10-02

Unique Testing

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2026-09-29

Nikolai M's team had a flaky CI/CD build. About 0.5% of the time, one of their tests would fail: frequent enough to be annoying, but not so frequent that it motivated management to assign anybody to investigate. Nikolai eventually dug in, taking the initiative.

Microsoft's implementation of UUIDs calls them GUIDs. The GUID is, per the docs, really just a wrapper around UUID algorithms, and supports a variety of different UUID variants. I'm sure at some historical point, this wasnt't true, and Microsoft had some weird internal algorithm. That's not really here nor there, but the test that was failing was failing because of an assertion relating to GUIDs.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2026-10-04

Historical Pads

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-09-24

Tim inherited a fairly antique Visual Basic application some time back. Yes, Visual Basic, not VB .Net. The application is old enough that we might consider it "vintage" or "historical"; it certainly dates from before the millennium. But it has its own unique approach to handling historical dates:

  mnYear% = CInt(Year(vntDate)) 
  If mnYear% < 1000 Then 
       msYear$ = "0" & Trim$(CStr(mnYear%)) 
  Else 
       msYear$ = Trim$(CStr(mnYear%)) 
  End If

25 comments - Last comment @ 2026-09-30

The John Cage Variable

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-09-22

David C sends us a true confession.

For my job, I write C++ code as if it was a scripting language (long story) to produce programmatic animations for videos. Given that these are "write-and-run-once-and-never-look-at-it-again" programs, I tend to not try as hard to make my code good. But once I wrote this line of code, I had to take a step back and reevaluate my life choices.

10 comments - Last comment @ 2026-09-23