The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Copy/Paste Culture

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2020-02-19

Mark F had just gone to production on the first project at his new job: create a billables reconciliation report that an end-user had requested a few years ago. It was clearly not a high priority, which was exactly why it was the perfect items to assign a new programmer.

"Unfortunately," the end user reported, "it just doesn't seem to be working. It's running fine on test, but when I run it on the live site I'm getting a SELECT permission denied on the object fn_CalculateBusinessDays message. Any idea what that means?"

40 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-26

Microsoft's English Pluralization Service

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2020-01-28

Despite founding The Daily WTF more than fifteen years ago, I still find myself astonished and perplexed by the curious perversions in information technology that you all send in. These days, I spend most of my time doing "CEO of Inedo stuff", which means I don't get to code that much. And when I do, it's usually working with the beautiful, completely WTF- and bug-free code that our that our world-class engineers create.

I mention this, because when I come across TDWTF-worthy code on my own, in the wild, it's a very special occasion. And today, I'm excited to share with you one of the worst pieces of code I've seen in a very long time: EnglishPluralizationServices.cs

68 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-17

The Compliance Ropeway

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2020-01-09

"So, let me get this straight," Derrick said. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath while massaging his temples before letting out an exasperated sigh. "Not a single person... in this entire organization... is taking ANY responsibility for Ropeway? No one is even willing to admit that they know anything about this application...?"

The Operations team had grown accustomed to their new director's mannerisms and learned it's just better to stay silent and let Derrick think out loud. Afterall, no one envied his job or his idealistic quest for actual compliance. If had he been at the bank as long as his team had, Derrick would have learned that there's compliance... and then there's "compliance."

34 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-06

Classic WTF: Manager of the Data Dump

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2019-11-28

It's a holiday in the US, where we catalog the things we're thankful for. I'm thankful that developers collectively learned to understand how databases work, and didn't start releasing databases that stored flexible documents with no real schema and could just be used as a data dump. That would be terrible! This classic WTF illustrates that. Originally. --Remy

J.T. is not well liked amongst the developers at his organization. As a Database Administrator, it's J.T's job to make sure that database structures and queries maintain data integrity and do not put an unnecessarily load on the server. This often gets in the way of the developers, who prefer to think of the database as a giant dump site where data gets thrown and is rummaged through to be retrieved. Things like "indexes," "valid data," and "naming conventions" are merely obstacles put in place by J.T. to make their life harder.

Generally, the submission-review-rejection procedure happens once or twice with most of the developers. But one particular developer -- a newly hired ".NET Wizard" named Frank -- turns the procedure into a daily cycle that drags on for several weeks. Following is Frank's reply to the first in a chain of rejections on a project that Frank was leading up ...

31 comments - Last comment @ 2019-12-11

Overlapping Complexity

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2019-11-07

After his boss left the company, Joel C was promoted to team lead. This meant that Joel was not only responsible for their rather large production codebase, but also for interviewing new potential team members. There are a ton of coding questions that one can ask in a technical interview, and Joel figured he should ask one that they actually solve in their application: given two unordered sets of timestamps, calculate how much overlap (if any) is between the two series.

If you think about it for a minute, it's really quite simple: first, find the minimum and maximum values for each set to get the start and end times (e.g. [01:08:01,01:09:55] and [01:04:11,01:09:42]). Then, subtract the later start time (01:08:01) from the earlier end time (01:09:42) to get the overlap (01:09:42 - 01:08:01 = 00:01:41). A non-positive result would indicate there's no overlap (such as 12:00:04 - 13:11:43), and in that case, it should probably just be zero. Or, in a single line of code:

36 comments - Last comment @ 2019-12-15

What Lives Beyond the Blue Screen (2019)

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2019-10-31

As promised in the sneak peak, we have a very special Halloween feature planned for today! What Lives Beyond the Blue Screen is an animated story by Lorne Kates (voiced by Jack Rhysider), made in collaboration with our new friends at Human Readable Magazine:

An everyday programmer decides to clean up the mess of his company's infrastructure before the big merger only to accidentally run the wrong command on the wrong location. Join the adventure as they rush to fix the mistake before they bring down the entire company.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-05

Sneak Peak: What Lives Beyond the Blue Screen

by Alex Papadimoulis in Announcements on 2019-10-24

I’m totally stoked for what we have brewing for Halloween. It’s called What Lives Beyond the Blue Screen, and we’ve got a fun sneak peak for you:

7 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-29

First Annual Developer Mentorship Survey

by Alex Papadimoulis in Announcements on 2019-10-23

Nearly fifteen years ago, I wrote Pounding A Nail: Old Shoe or Glass Bottle?. It opened by asking how one might respond to the following question:

A client has asked me to build and install a custom shelving system. I'm at the point where I need to nail it, but I'm not sure what to use to pound the nails in. Should I use an old shoe or a glass bottle?

23 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-05