The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Three Letter Acronyms, Four Letter Words

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-15

Candice (previously) has another WTF to share for us.

We're going to start by just looking at one fragment of a class defined in this C++ code: TLAflaList.

10 comments - Last comment @ 14:23

Non-cogito Ergo c_str

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-13

Tim (previously) supports a relatively ancient C++ application. And that creates some interesting conundrums, as the way you wrote C++ in 2003 is not the way you would write it even a few years later. The standard matured quickly.

Way back in 2003, it was still common to use C-style strings, instead of the C++ std::string type. It seems silly, but people had Strong Opinions™ about using standard library types, and much of your C++ code was probably interacting with C libraries, so yeah, C-strings stuck around for a long time.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-14

Take a Percentage

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-09

When looking at the source of a major news site, today's anonymous submitter sends us this very, very mild, but also very funny WTF:

	<div class="g-vhs g-videotape g-cinemagraph" id="g-video-178_article_slug-640w"
		 data-type="videotape" data-asset="https://somesite.com/videos/file.mp4" data-cinemagraph="true" data-allow-multiple-players="true"
		 data-vhs-options='{"ratio":"560:320"}'
		 style="padding-bottom: 57.14285714285714%">

19 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-10

Two Conversions

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-08

The father of the "billion dollar mistake" left us last month. His pointer is finally null. Speaking of null handling, Randy says he was "spelunking" through his codebase and found this pair of functions, which handles null.

public String getDataString() {
    if (dataString == null) {
        return Constants.NOT_AVAILABLE;
    }
    return asUnicode(dataString);
}

15 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-14

Proper Property Validation

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-07

Tim H inherited some code which has objects that have many, many properties properties on them. Which is bad. That clearly has no cohesion. But it's okay, there's a validator function which confirms that object is properly populated.

The conditions and body of the conditionals have been removed, so we can see what the flow of the code looks like.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-09

The Update Route

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-06

Today's anonymous submission is one of the entries where I look at it and go, "Wait, that's totally wrong, that could have never worked." And then I realize, that's why it was submitted: it was absolutely broken code which got to production, somehow.

Collection.updateOne(query, update, function(err, result, next)=>{
if(err) next(err)
...
})

8 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-07

One Case

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-02

I feel like we've gotten a few SQL case statement abuses recently, but a properly bad one continues to tickle me. Ken C sends us one that, well:

SELECT CASE h.DOCUMENTTYPE
        WHEN 2 THEN 3 WHEN 3 THEN 4 WHEN 4 THEN 5
        WHEN 5 THEN 6 WHEN 6 THEN 7 WHEN 7 THEN 8
        ELSE h.DOCUMENTTYPE
    END AS DocumentType,
    h.DOCNMBR AS DocNmbr,
    h.FULLPOLICY AS FullPolicy,
    h.BATCHID AS BatchId,
    h.OrigBatchId,
    h.UPDATEDDATE AS UpdatedDate,
    h.CUSTOMERNO AS CustomerNo,
    h.PROJECTID AS ProjectID,
    h.AMOUNT AS Amount

31 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-07

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