The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Intern's Gadget

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-01-30

Pierre is a contractor who supports a variety of companies helping them manage data-science and analytics applications. Code, in these contexts, is written to answer specific questions, driven more by mathematics than program design. That’s a polite way of saying that the vast majority of the code is unreadable nonsense that no one can explain.

One of Pierre’s clients has decided to migrate to that fancy new thing they’ve been hearing about, “the cloud”, and thus they have to move all of their applications to that cloud. This suite of applications involved a website with a pile of “gadgets” that users could string together to do their own data analysis. And one of those gadgets was quickly thrown together by an intern circa 2007.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-01

Exceptoinal Spelling

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-01-29

Object-oriented languages often let you implement your own exception classes to hook into their structured exception handling. This is, usually, a good thing: you create your own custom types for your various errors, which makes various exception states more clear. PebkacException is more useful than just Exception, and you can build catch blocks specific to your application/API needs.

But there’s a dark side to this feature. People want to hook functionality into their exception objects. Instead of just using them as a signal to announce a failure state, they slap features into them, like exceptions which automatically self log.

47 comments - Last comment @ 2020-03-06

A Splash of Color

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-01-27

YouTube, like any reasonable video service, offers closed captioning. They'll even throw machine learning at the problem, and autogenerate captions, though that is usually only good for comedy, rather than actual accesibility.

Any closed captioning system will generally let you specify the colors of the captions as well as the actual text. YouTube is no exception to that. YouTube offers an online editor, but anyone serious about producing content is going to upload their own subtitle files, and up until recently, this could be done in an XML file which would allowed a lot of control over the styling of the captions.

32 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-02

A Short Year

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2020-01-23

Are we sick of of year rollover bugs yet? Well, let’s just agree that people aren’t sick of making these kinds of bugs.

A long time ago, someone at Oleksandr’s company needed to write a Python script that shipped a 4-digit year to a system that only accepted 2-digit years. So 2010 needed to turn into 10.

45 comments - Last comment @ 2020-11-18

Two Heads Are Better Than One

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2020-01-22

What, exactly set of features divide a "text editor" from an IDE is a bit of a blurry line. Developers are not the sort to use static, unchangeable tools. They want configuration, they want plugins, they want quick access to a terminal, they want debugging support, and they'll bolt those features into just about anything.

There's a fine line between an IDE that provides nice utility to the developer, and an IDE which is opinionated. I had the misfortune long ago to use the WebSphere IDE, which was essentially a repackaged version of early Eclipse bundled with highly opinionated plugins about how you were supposed to build a Java application. As Matt puts it: "An IDE is, to some, a high-functionality tool for developing applications, and to others a classic example of an Inner Platform."

46 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-30

An Enterprise API

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-01-21

There’s a simple rule about “enterprise” software: if the word “enterprise” is used in any way to describe the product, it’s a terrible product. Enterprise products are usually pretty special purpose and serve a well-capitalized but usually relatively small market. You aren’t going to sell licenses to millions of companies, but maybe tens of thousands. Often hundreds. There are some extremely niche enterprise products that have only two or three customers.

Lots of money, combined with an actually small market in terms of customers, guarantees no real opportunity for competition. Couple that with the fact that each of your customers wants the off-the-shelf product you’re selling them to have every feature they need for their business case, you’re on a fast track to bloated software, inner platforms, and just general awfulness.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-24

Switch Off

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-01-16

There are certain things which you see in code that, at first glance, if you haven’t already learned better, look like they might almost be clever. One of those in any construct that starts with:

switch(true) {…}

45 comments - Last comment @ 2020-03-13

Y2K15

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2020-01-15

We’re still in the early part of the year, and as little glitches show up from “sliding window” fixes to the Y2K bug, we’re seeing more and more little stories of other date rollover weirdness in our inbox.

Like, for example, the Y2K15 bug, which Encore got to get surprised with. It feels like date issues are turning into a sports game franchise: new releases of the same thing every year.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2020-11-18

Gormless and Gone

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2020-01-14

There’s always a hope that in the future, our code will be better. Eventually, we won’t be dealing with piles of krufty legacy code and unprepared programmers and business users who don’t understand how clicking works. It’s 2020: we officially live in the future. Things aren’t better.

Duane works in Go, and has a piping hot “Representative Line” written in 2020. If, like me, you don’t quite know Go, it still looks pretty terrible at first glance:

18 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-24

An Unreal Json Parser

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-01-13

As we've discussed in the past, video game code probably shouldn't be held to the standards of your average WTF: they're operating under wildly different constraints. So, for example, when a popular indie game open sources itself, and people find all sorts of horrors in the codebase: hey, the game shipped and made money. This isn't life or death stuff.

It's a little different when you're building the engine. You're not just hacking together whatever you need to make your product work, but putting together a reusable platform to make other people's products work.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2021-05-27

Sharing the Power

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-01-08

"For my sins," John writes, "I'm working on a SharePoint 2010 migration."

This tells us that John has committed a lot of sins. But not as many as one of his coworkers.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-12

Y-Ok

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2020-01-07

Twenty years out, people have a hard time remembering that Y2K was an actual thing, an actual problem, and it was only solved because people recognized the danger well ahead of time, and invested time and effort into mitigating the worst of it. Disaster didn’t come to pass because people worked their butts off to avoid it.

Gerald E was one of those people. He worked for a cellular provider as a customer service rep, providing technical support and designing the call-center scripts for providing that support. As 1999 cranked on, Gerald was pulled in to the Y2K team to start making support plans for the worst case scenarios.

36 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-17

Yet Another Master of Evil

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-01-06

As a general rule, if you find yourself writing an extension system for your application, stop and do something else. It's almost always in the case of YAGNI: you ain't gonna need it.

George is a "highly paid consultant", and considers himself one of the "good ones": he delivers well tested, well documented, and clean code to his clients. His peer, Gracie on the other hand… is a more typical representative of the HPC class.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-08

Untested Builds

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-01-02

Kaylee E made an "oops" and checked in a unit test with a bug in it which caused the test to fail. She didn't notice right away, and thus the commit hit their CI pipeline and was automatically pulled by the build server. She assumed that when she checked the logs she'd see the error, but she didn't. The build completed, and Tests (0/0) ran successfully.

Now, Kaylee was new to the codebase, and since she'd been doing small changes, she'd simply written and run tests around explicitly the functionality she was testing. She hadn't yet done a full test run locally, so that was her next step. From there, it was easy to see why the build server didn't automatically run tests.

38 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-16