The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Classic WTF: Dimensioning the Dimension

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2020-07-06

It was a holiday weekend in the US, so we're taking a little break. Yes, I know that most people took Friday off, but as this article demonstrates, dates remain hard. Original -- Remy

It's not too uncommon to see a Java programmer write a method to get the name of a month based on the month number. Sure, month name formatting is built in via SimpleDateFormat, but the documentation can often be hard to read. And since there's really no other place to find the answer, it's excusable that a programmer will just write a quick method to do this.

I have to say though, Robert Cooper's colleague came up with a very interesting way of doing this: adding an[other] index to an array ...

18 comments - Last comment @ 2020-07-09

Classic WTF: Slightly More Sociable

by Alex Papadimoulis in Tales from the Interview on 2020-06-24

As we continue our vacation, this classic comes from the ancient year of 2007, when "used to being the only woman in my engineering and computer science classes" was a much more common phrase. Getting a job can feel competitive, but there are certain ways you can guarantee you're gonna lose that competition. Original --Remy

Today’s Tale from the Interview comes from Shanna...

Fresh out of college, and used to being the only woman in my engineering and computer science classes, I wasn't quite sure what to expect in the real world. I happily ended up finding a development job in a company which was nowhere near as unbalanced as my college classes had been. The company was EXTREMELY small and the entire staff, except the CEO, was in one office. I ended up sitting at a desk next to the office admin, another woman who was hired a month or two after me.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2020-06-30

Classic WTF: The Developmestuction Environment

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2020-06-23

We continue to enjoy a brief respite from mining horrible code and terrible workplaces. This classic includes this line: "It requires that… Adobe Indesign is installed on the web server." Original --Remy

Have you ever thought what it would take for you to leave a new job after only a few days? Here's a fun story from my colleague Jake Vinson, whose co-worker of three days would have strongly answered "this."

One of the nice thing about externalizing connection strings is that it's easy to duplicate a database, duplicate the application's files, change the connection string to point to the new database, and bam, you've got a test environment.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2020-06-26

Classic WTF: A Char'd Enum

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2020-05-25

It's a holiday in the US today, so we're reaching back into the archives while doing some quarantine grilling. This classic has a… special approach to handling enums. Original. --Remy

Ah yes, the enum. It's a convenient way to give an integer a discrete domain of values, without having to worry about constants. But you see, therein lies the problem. What happens if you don't want to use an integer? Perhaps you'd like to use a string? Or a datetime? Or a char?

If that were the case, some might say just make a class that acts similarly, or then you clearly don't want an enum. But others, such as Dan Holmes' colleague, go a different route. They make sure they can fit chars into enums.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2020-05-29

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."

35 comments - Last comment @ 2020-08-03

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