The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Waiting for October

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-02-17

Arguably, the worst moment for date times was the shift from Julian to Gregorian calendars. The upgrade took a long time, too, as some countries were using the Julian calendar over 300 years from the official changeover, famously featured in the likely aprochryphal story about Russia arriving late for the Olympics.

At least that change didn't involve adding any extra months, unlike some of the Julian reforms, which involved adding multiple "intercalary months" to get the year back in sync after missing a pile of leap years.

20 comments - Last comment @ 15:40

C+=0.25

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-02-16

A good C programmer can write C in any language, especially C++. A bad C programmer can do the same, and a bad C programmer will do all sorts of terrifying things in the process.

Gaetan works with a terrible C programmer.

11 comments - Last comment @ 16:17

Consistently Transactional

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-02-12

It's always good to think through how any given database operation behaves inside of a transaction. For example, Faroguy inherited a Ruby codebase which was mostly db.execute("SOME SQL") without any transactions at all. This caused all sorts of problems with half-finished operations polluting the database.

Imagine Faroguy's excitement upon discovering a function called db_trans getting called in a few places. Well, one place, but that's better than none at all. This clearly must mean that at least one operation was running inside of a transaction, right?

12 comments - Last comment @ 2026-02-16

Cover Up

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-02-11

Goodhart's Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Or, more to the point: you get what you measure.

If, for example, you measure code coverage, you are going to get code coverage. It doesn't mean the tests will be any good, it just means that you'll write tests that exercise different blocks of code.

9 comments - Last comment @ 2026-02-11

Invalid Passport

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-02-09

Gretchen wanted to, in development, disable password authentication. Just for a minute, while she was testing things. That's when she found this approach to handling authentication.

passport.authenticate('local', { session: true }, async (err, user) => {
  if (err) {
    res.send({ success: false, message: 'Error authenticating user.' })
  } else if (!user) {
    User.query()
      .where({ username: req.body.username })
      .first()
      .then(targetUser => {
        if (targetUser) {
          const hash = User.hashPassword(
            targetUser.password_salt,
            req.body.password
          )
          if (hash === targetUser.password_hash) {
            res.send({
              success: false,
              message: 'Incorrect username or password.',
            })
          } else {
            res.send({
              success: false,
              message: 'Incorrect username or password.',
            })
          }
        } else {
          res.send({
            success: false,
            message: 'Incorrect username or password.',
          })
        }
      })
      .catch(err => {
        res.send({ success: false, message: 'Internal server error' })
      })
  } else if (user.firstLogin) {
//......
  }
})(req, res, next);

12 comments - Last comment @ 2026-02-12

Brillant Python Programmers

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-02-05

Sandra from InitAg (previously) tries to keep the team's code quality up. The team she's on uses CI, code reviews, linting and type checking, and most important: hiring qualified people. Overall, the team's been successful recently. Recently.

The company got its start doing data-science, which meant much of the initial code was written by brilliant PhDs who didn't know the first thing about writing software. Most of that code has been retired, but it is impossible to dispatch all of it.

13 comments - Last comment @ 2026-02-09

This Router Says **** You

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-02-04

Denilson uses a password manager, like one should. Except there was a router which simply would not let the password manager fill the password field. Sure, Denilson could just copy and paste, but the question of why remained.

And that meant checking the HTML and JavaScript code the router served up. Just pulling up the dev tools brought up all sorts of "fun" discoveries. For example, the application was built in Vue, a front-end framework. But in addition to using Vue, it also used jQuery for some DOM manipulations. But it didn't just use jQuery. It loaded jquery-3.5.1.slim.min.js directly from its static files. It also loaded vendor.js which also contained the same version of jQuery. At least it was the same version.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2026-02-12

A Percise Parser

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-02-03

Thomas worked for a company based in Germany which was looking to expand internationally. Once they started servicing other locales, things started to break. It didn't take long to track the problem down to a very "percise" numeric parser.

handleInput( value ){
   let value_ = value;
   if( value.substring( 0, 1 ) === '+' ){
      value_ = value.substring( 1 );
   }

   value_ = value_.split( '.' ).join( '' );

   if( this.usePercisionIfPercentage && value_.indexOf( ',' ) >= 0 ) {
      const parsedPreValue = value_.split( ',' )[ 0 ];
      const parsedCommaValue = parseInt( value_.split( ',' )[ 1 ], 10 ) < 10 ?
         parseInt( value_.split( ',' )[ 1 ], 10 ) * 10 : value_.split( ',' )[ 1 ].substring( 0, 2 );

      if( parsedCommaValue === 0 ) {
         value_ = parseInt( parsedPreValue, 10 );
      }
      else {
         const parsedValue = parseInt( parsedPreValue + parsedCommaValue, 10 );
         value_ = parseInt( parsedValue, 10 ) / 100;
      }
   }
   
   // do stuff with value_
}

16 comments - Last comment @ 2026-02-13

Wages of Inheritance

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-02-02

Tim H writes:

Some say that OOP was the greatest mistake of all. I say they weren't trying hard enough.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2026-02-03

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