The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Table This for a Moment

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-01-26

Relational databases have very different constraints on how they structure and store data than most programming languages- tables and relationships don't map neatly to objects. They also have very different ways in which they can be altered. With software, you can just release a new version, but a database requires careful alterations lest you corrupt your data.

There are many ways to try and address that mismatch in our software, but sometimes the mismatch isn't in our software, it's in our brains.

27 comments - Last comment @ 15:49

Demo Most Dear

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2021-01-25

Reese was driving home from work one day in 2012 when his cell phone rang out over his driving music. It wasn't a number he had stored in his contacts, but the area code and prefix were clearly from his office.

30 comments - Last comment @ 06:57

Infinite NaN

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2021-01-22

"For NaN easy payments of infinity dollars per month, this too can be YOURS!" Daniel B. writes.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2021-01-25

Failing the Test

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2021-01-21

Like many dev teams, Rubi's team relies heavily on continuous integration. Their setup, like many others, relies on git hooks, and whenever someone pushes a commit to any branch, it automatically runs all the associated unit tests. Good code stays green, and any bugs are immediately revealed. Branches with failing tests cannot be merged into the main branch, which is all pretty reasonable.

Recently, Ruby pushed a commit on a branch up, and pretty much immediately realized that the tests were going to fail because she forgot to update a related code file. Even as she started to amend the commit, she waited for the CI server to cough up an error. And waited. And waited. And waited.

48 comments - Last comment @ 2021-01-25

Go Forth, Young Programmer

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2021-01-20

The past is another planet, but a familiar one. Back in the far off year of 1989, Rick Poleshuck took a job with a company that made a computer product for nurses's stations in hospitals. Now, this product was for notes, and it was an "all inclusive" product- software, proprietary hardware, networking, terminals, everything. And it was written in Forth.

Now, this is what we might call a "classic Forth" system, and in such a system, Forth ran on bare metal. No OS, no filesystem, and a simple scheduler. This was also the system they developed on: the source just lived in raw 1KB blocks on the hard disk, and they edited blocks directly. That's not a WTF, that's just how things were done in that environment.

24 comments - Last comment @ 05:03

Version Chaos

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2021-01-19

Today's submitter, Erica, writes: Every time I tell this story to other developers they don't believe it, because this is quite possibly the dumbest way version control has ever been done.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2021-01-21

The Whiteboard Challenge

by Remy Porter in Tales from the Interview on 2021-01-18

Like many of us, Igor F keeps his LinkedIn profile vaguely up to date with his career, and that means he inevitably gets messages from recruiters trying to find talent for the latest trendy startup, or the big stable company struggling to find developers happy to work in its code mines, or the contracting company trying to staff up.

Igor usually ignored the pitch, but one recruiter said they were representing a startup in a domain that Igor was really interested in, and was hinting that they had money to burn.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2021-01-25

Something or Nothing at All

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2021-01-15

"I didn't know that I could buy an empty shopping cart from name.com, but here I am," Tom writes.

8 comments - Last comment @ 2021-01-18

A Match Made In…

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-01-14

Andy C writes:

One of our colleagues dug this code up from an outsourced project. Took a few us to try to find out what it actually does, we're still not completely sure.

40 comments - Last comment @ 2021-01-25

Callback Bondage

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-01-13

"Garbage collected languages can't have memory leaks," is well established as a myth, but we still have plenty of code which refuses to clean up after itself properly.

An anonymous submitter was working with a single-page-app front-end which wraps a stream abstraction around a websocket. Messages arrive on the stream, and callbacks get invoked. When certain parameters change, new callbacks need to be registered to handle the new behavior. The old callbacks need to be unbound- and it's that step this code doesn't do.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2021-01-25

Put in Order

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-01-12

Rust is one of the "cool" languages these days. It promises all the low-level power of C with memory safety and "modern" programming conventions like iterables and maps. High performance, expressive language, low-level power seems like a great combination for certain domains.

Now, Jenna Winchester needed to do some Morton Coding or Z-indexing, which is an algorithm which lets you take multidimensional points and turn them into 1-dimensional points in a way that maintains their spatial relationships- essentially a fast way of traversing a quadtree. It's a fairly simple and fast algorithm, especially if you implement it using bitwise operations. A naive implementation, without optimizations, can do its job with very few CPU cycles, relatively speaking.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2021-01-16

It's a Gift

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2021-01-11

Tyra was standing around the coffee maker with her co-workers when their phones all dinged with an email from management.

Edgar is no longer employed at Initech. If you see him on the property, for any reason, please alert security.

45 comments - Last comment @ 2021-01-24

Nope, that was Prod

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2021-01-08

"They say you shouldn't test in prod... They aren't wrong." Dave P. writes.

10 comments - Last comment @ 2021-01-11

Going Backwards

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2021-01-07

Nearly 15 years ago, fresh out of college, Giuseppe was hired on at a mobile networking company. The company wasn't a software company, but since they were heavy in networking and could handle all sorts of weird technical problems there, software must basically be the same thing, so they also started producing applications to manage those networks.

It didn't take them long to discover that "building networks" and "writing software" are different skillsets, and so they did what every company with some room in the budget does: they hire a pack of Highly Paid Consultants to get their project on track.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2021-01-09

Copy Paste Paste Paste Paste

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-01-06

"Hey," someone on Russell F's team said. "We should add some keyboard navigation to our web app." That struck everyone as an "easy win", specifically because they were really talking about making "enter" and "escape" do something useful.

They wrote some quick requirements, passed it off, and the developer submitted a surprisingly long pull request. Russell passed a sample of three out of the dozens of methods:

18 comments - Last comment @ 2021-01-18

The Contract Position

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2021-01-05

Mandi didn't plan to take a staff job at a university. To the contrary, she'd heard some bad things: loads of office politics, budgets so thin you need quantum mechanics to describe their position, and bureaucracy thick enough to drown any project.

But one day, she met her old colleague Scot for lunch, and they got to chatting about his university job. "Oh, yeah, that's common enough," he said, "which is why my team isn't structured that way. We're doing in-house development of educational solutions, which is a fancy way of saying 'nobody understands what we do, so they leave us alone'."

20 comments - Last comment @ 2021-01-13

Generated Requests

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-01-04

If you've worked with developing software of any real complexity, you've probably come across a library or tool that does code generation. Instead of writing all the boring boiler-plate stuff yourself, you maybe throw a little configuration at the system and let it generate all those classes for you. I'd argue that, in most cases, that sort of thing is a code smell- it's not in and of itself bad, but it hints as missed abstractions. There's probably a general way to represent what you want to represent without generating a big pile of classes. The question is: is the additional abstraction worth it, or should you just generate code to get it done?

Russell was recently browsing the documentation for Amazon Web Services. The Java SDK allows you to send requests to AWS to automate things in their cloud. When you send a request, you need an AmazonWebServiceRequest object. Now, AmazonWebServiceRequest is itself an abstract class, so we need to send a concrete implementation, specific to the operation we want to perform. That means it's going to be one of:

14 comments - Last comment @ 2021-01-08

Winter ...Delivered!

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2021-01-01

"I wanted to find out how much snow Providence got overnight and apparently, Amazon wants to sell me some of it," Francis B. writes.

8 comments - Last comment @ 2021-01-03

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