The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Code Snippet Of the Day (CodeSOD) features interesting and usually incorrect code snippets taken from actual production code in a commercial and/or open source software projects.

Build Up

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-06-04

If there's one thing that seems to be a constant source of issues, it's people constructing SQL queries through string concatenation. Even if you're using parameters in the query, I'm opposed to handling raw SQL as strings in my programs. My solution is always "use a builder"- an API that constructs a syntax tree that it can then render to SQL as needed. (Yes, a builder, not an ORM, that's a whole other discussion, I'm not dogmatically anti-ORM, but it's a leaky abstraction at best.)

Many languages have such a thing, Java included. Lukasz's team was using Java, and they had a rule: "don't do SQL strings, use a builder". Unfortunately for Lukasz's team, their guideline didn't specify what kind of builder.

8 comments - Last comment @ 12:14

Coerce the Truth Out of You

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-06-03

Frank suspected something odd when he spotted a use of React's useMemo function in some JavaScript code. Now, there's nothing wrong with using that method, in and of itself. It watches some variables and recalculates a callback if they change for any reason. It's a great tool for when you want to avoid recalculating expensive things over and over again.

But in this case, the calculation in question was isAuthorized, which wasn't an expensive calculation; it was just checking if certain values are set. The code looked like this:

7 comments - Last comment @ 2026-06-03

Blocked the Date

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-06-02

Volodya sends us some bad date handling code in PHP. Which, I know, you're just reaching for the close tab and yawning when you hear that. You've seen it before. But bear with me, this one still has some fun bits to it.

$monthes = array(
        1 => 'Января', 2 => 'Февраля', 3 => 'Марта', 4 => 'Апреля',
        5 => 'Мая', 6 => 'Июня', 7 => 'Июля', 8 => 'Августа',
        9 => 'Сентября', 10 => 'Октября', 11 => 'Ноября', 12 => 'Декабря'
);

17 comments - Last comment @ 2026-06-03

Recent CodeSOD

Build Up

Coerce the Truth Out of You

Blocked the Date