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by Remy Porter on (#7539W)
Eric O worked for a medical device company. The medical device industry moves slowly, relative to other technical industries. Medical science and safety have their own cadence, and at a certain point, iterating faster doesn't matter much.Eric was working on a new feature on a system that had been in use for thirteen years. This new feature interacted with a database which stored information about racks of test tubes, and Eric's tests meant creating several entries for racks of test tubes. And that's when Eric discovered that the database only allowed thirty racks. Add any more, it would just roll right back over to one.This was odd. The database was small- less than 40MB, even in production- and there were automatic tasks to purge old data for compliance purposes. Why a hard limit of thirty?Eric had only been at the company for a year, so he asked one of the more senior team members, Lester. "Oh yeah, that was before my time. You should probably ask Carl."Later that day, Eric happened to bump into Carl around the coffee maker, and asked the question. "Oh, yeah, I do vaguely remember something about that. It was in the requirements for the product. I thought it was weird, but didn't think too much about it. You should probably ask Elise, she's been here like twenty years."Well, now it was getting curious. Eric went over to the "old building", as it was named, the original office for the company on the other side of the parking lot. Most of the offices had moved to the new building a decade earlier, and it mostly served as fabrication and storage, but a few offices remained.Elise was on the third floor, down a poorly lit hallway, sitting in an office with water-stained acoustical tile in its ceiling. "Oh, yeah, I put that into the requirements document. It's funny, I thought it was weird too, but the system you're working on was a replacement for an older system. Our requirements were derived from those. Let me think... Irving worked on that, but he's dead, god rest him. Penny is retired. Oh, you know, Humbert is still around. He didn't work on that, but he worked on some of the systems that came before that. He's upstairs and on the other side of the building."Eric went upstairs and to the other side of the building. The fourth floor had been last remodeled circa 1985, and the ugly industrial paint on the wall was made even uglier by the fact that someone had replaced most of the flourescent tubes with LEDs. Most. The mismatched color temperature started Eric down the path of a headache.Humbert was in an office similar to Elise's. On his desk was a plaque commemerating 40 years of service with the company. Eric asked about the limitation, and Humbert laughed."You're working on the latest version of a product that initially started on an old PDP-11 running MUMPS. I mean, the first versions, anyway. We ran to desktop computers as fast as we could. I wrote a version for DOS in... oh... '86? I knew none of the facilities we worked with had more than ten or fifteen racks of tubes, and I needed somehow to limit the size of the database so it all fit on a single 5 1/4" floppy disk. I picked thirty, because it seemed like a good round number. Honestly, I'm shocked that the limit still exists."So was Eric. There had been several ground-up-rewrites since 1986, before the one Eric maintained had been released thirteen years ago. Each one of them had chosen to maintain the same limitation, without ever considering why it existed. The rule had simply been copied, mindlessly, for 40 years."I'm kind of impressed," Eric said to Humbert, "in a horrified way.""Me too, kid, me too." [Advertisement] Keep all your packages and Docker containers in one place, scan for vulnerabilities, and control who can access different feeds. ProGet installs in minutes and has a powerful free version with a lot of great features that you can upgrade when ready.Learn more.
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The Daily WTF
| Link | http://thedailywtf.com/ |
| Feed | http://syndication.thedailywtf.com/TheDailyWtf |
| Updated | 2026-04-21 21:01 |
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by Remy Porter on (#752E2)
"Here, you're a programmer, take this over. It's business critical."That's what Felicity's boss told her when he pointed her to a network drive containing an Excel spreadsheet. The Excel spreadsheet contained a pile of macros. The person who wrote it had left, and nobody knew how to make it work, but the macros in question were absolutely business vital.Also, it's in French.We'll take this one in chunks. The indentation is as in the original.
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by Lyle Seaman on (#750PT)
It's time again for a reader special, and once again it's all The Beast In Black (there must be a story to that nick, no?)."MySQL is not better than your SQL," he pontificated, "especially whenit comes to the Workbench Migration Wizard"
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by Remy Porter on (#74ZV8)
Nona writes: "this is the beginning of a 2100 line function."That's bad. Nona didn't send us the entire JavaScript function, but sent us just the three early lines, which definitely raise concerns:
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by Remy Porter on (#74YXS)
Candice (previously) has another WTF to share for us.We're going to start by just looking at one fragment of a class defined in this C++ code: TLAflaList.Every type and variable has a three-letter-acronym buried in its name. The specific meaning of most of the acronyms are mostly lost to time, so "TLA" is as good as any other three random letters. No one knows what "fla" is.What drew Candice's attention was that there was a type called "list", which implies they're maybe not using the standard library and have reinvented a wheel. Another data point arguing in favor of that is that the class had a method called getNumElements, instead of something more conventional like size.Let's look at that function:
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by Remy Porter on (#74Y12)
Theresa works for a company that handles a fair bit of personally identifiable information that can be tied to health care data, so for them, security matters. They need to comply with security practices laid out by a variety of standards bodies and be able to demonstrate that compliance.There's a dirty secret about standards compliance, though. Most of these standards are trying to avoid being overly technically prescriptive. So frequently, they may have something like, "a process must exist for securely destroying storage devices before they are disposed of." Maybe it will include some examples of what you could do to meet this standard, but the important thing is that you have to have a process. This means that if you whip up a Word document called "Secure Data Destruction Process" and tell people they should follow it, you can check off that box on your compliance. Sometimes, you need to validate the process; sometimes you need to have other processes which ensure this process is being followed. What you need to do and to what complexity depends on the compliance structure you're beholden to. Some of them are surprisingly flexible, which is a polite way of saying "mostly meaningless".Theresa's company has a process for safely destroying hard drives. They even validated it, shortly after its introduction. They even have someone who checks that the process has been followed. The process is this: in the basement, someone set up a cheap drill press, and attached a wooden jig to it. You slap the hard drive in the jig, turn on the drill, and brrrrzzzzzz- poke a hole through the platters making the drive unreadable.There's just one problem with that process: the company recently switched to using SSDs. The SSDs are in a carrier which makes them share the same form factor as old-style spinning disk drives, but that's just a thin plastic shell. The actual electronics package where the data is stored is quite small. Small enough, and located in a position where the little jig attached to the drill guarantees that the drill won't even touch the SSD at all.For months now, whenever a drive got decommissioned, the IT drone responsible for punching a hole through it has just been drilling through plastic, and nothing else. An unknown quantity of hard drives have been sent out for recycling with PII and health data on them. But it's okay, because the process was followed.The compliance team at the company will update the process, probably after six months of meetings and planning and approvals from all of the stakeholders. Though it may take longer to glue together a new jig for the SSDs. [Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!
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by Remy Porter on (#74X5H)
Tim (previously) supports a relatively ancient C++ application. And that creates some interesting conundrums, as the way you wrote C++ in 2003 is not the way you would write it even a few years later. The standard matured quickly.Way back in 2003, it was still common to use C-style strings, instead of the C++ std::string type. It seems silly, but people had Strong OpinionsTM about using standard library types, and much of your C++ code was probably interacting with C libraries, so yeah, C-strings stuck around for a long time.For Tim's company, however, the migration away from C-strings was in 2007.So they wrote this:
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by Lyle Seaman on (#74VD5)
"My thoughts exactly" muttered Jason H."I was in a system that avoids check constraints andthe developers never seemed to agree to a T/F orY/N or 1/0 for indicator columns. All data in acolumn will use the same pattern but different columns inthe same table will use different patterns so I'm notsure why I was surprised when I came across theattached. Sort the data descending and you have the shorthandfor what I uttered." How are these all unique?
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by Remy Porter on (#74THB)
When looking at the source of a major news site, today's anonymous submitter sends us this very, very mild, but also very funny WTF:
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by Remy Porter on (#74ST3)
The father of the "billion dollar mistake" left us last month. His pointer is finally null. Speaking of null handling, Randy says he was "spelunking" through his codebase and found this pair of functions, which handles null.
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by Remy Porter on (#74RXZ)
Tim H inherited some code which has objects that have many, many properties properties on them. Which is bad. That clearly has no cohesion. But it's okay, there's a validator function which confirms that object is properly populated.The conditions and body of the conditionals have been removed, so we can see what the flow of the code looks like.
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by Remy Porter on (#74R7F)
Today's anonymous submission is one of the entries where I look at it and go, "Wait, that's totally wrong, that could have never worked." And then I realize, that's why it was submitted: it was absolutely broken code which got to production, somehow.
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by Lyle Seaman on (#74PNE)
An anonymous cable-puller wrote "Reading a long specification manual.The words "shall" and "shall not" have specific meaning,and throughout the document are in bold italic. Lookslike someone got a bit shall-ow with their search-and-replaceskills."
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by Remy Porter on (#74NTA)
I feel like we've gotten a few SQL case statement abuses recently, but a properly bad one continues to tickle me. Ken C sends us one that, well:
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by Remy Porter on (#74N3N)
You've already read the longer version. You need a quick phrase of corpo-speak to distract and confuse your rivals. Here's the generator for doing that: Generate Now, admittedly, this generator may use a grammar for generating phrases, but it's not an English grammar, and the result is that sometimes it has problems with verb agreement and other prosaic English rules. I say, lean into it. Let someone challenge your bad grammar, and then look down your nose at them, and say: "I'm blue-skying the infosphere across new domains, you wouldn't get it." [Advertisement] Keep the plebs out of prod. Restrict NuGet feed privileges with ProGet. Learn more.
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by Remy Porter on (#74MYS)
As we all know, there are two basic kinds of scientific studies. The first is a ground-breaking paper that changes the way we view the world, and forces us to confront our presuppositions and biases about how we think the world works, and change our perspective. The other tells us what we already know to be true, and makes us feel good. The second kind, of course, is what we'd call "good science".Or, if you want to skip past this straight to the generator at the bottom.For example, what if I told you that people who are impressed by hyperbolic corporate jargon are dumber than you or I? It's probably something you already believe is true, but wouldn't you like a scientist to tell you that it's true?Well, have I got good news for you. If you're tired of hearing about "growth-hacking paradigms" researchers at Cornell found that people who are impressed by semantically empty phrases are also bad at making decisions.The entire paper is available, if you like charts.There are a few key highlights worth reading, though. The paper spends a fair bit of time distinguishing between "jargon" and "bullshit". Jargon is domain specific language that is impenetrable to "out-group" individuals, while bullshit may be just as impenetrable, but also is "semantically empty and confusing".It also has some ideas about why we drift from useful jargon to bullshit. It starts, potentially, as a way to navigate socially difficult situations by blunting our speech: I can't say that I think you're terrible at your job, but I can say you need to actualize the domain more than you currently are. But also, it's largely attempts to fluff ourselves up, whether it's trying to contribute to a meeting when we haven't an idea what we're talking about, or trying to just sound impressive or noble in public messaging. It seems that the backbone of bullshit is the people who didn't do the reading for Literature class but insist on holding forth during the classroom discussion, confident they can bullshit their way through.Of course, bullshit doesn't thrive unless you have people willing to fall for it. And when it comes to that, it's worth quoting the paper directly:
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by Remy Porter on (#74M3D)
Sandra from InitAg (previously) works with Bjorn, and Bjorn has some ideas about how database schemas should be organized.First, users should never see an auto-incrementing ID. That means you need to use UUIDs. But UUIDs are large and expensive, so they should never be your primary key, use an auto-incrementing ID for that.This is not, in and of itself, a radical or ridiculous statement. I've worked on many a database that followed similar rules. I've also seen "just use a UUID all the time" become increasingly common, especially on distributed databases, where incrementing counters is expensive.One can have opinions and disagreements about how we handle IDs in a database, but I wouldn't call anything a WTF there.No, the WTF is how Bjorn would design his cross-reference tables. You know, the tables which exist to permit many-to-many relationships between two other tables? Tables that should just be tableA.id and tableB.id?
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by Remy Porter on (#74K8G)
Angela's team hired someone who was "good" at SQL. When this person started, the team had some regular jobs which ran in the mornings. The jobs were fairly time consuming, and did a lot of database IO. When their current database person left for another job, they hired someone who had a "good grasp" on SQL. We'll call him Barry.Barry started out by checking the morning jobs every day. And over time, the morning jobs started getting slower and slower. That was a concern, but Barry swore he had it under control. Barry did not share that a handful of slow queries- queries which took three or so minutes to run- had suddenly started taking 75+ minutes to run. Barry didn't think about the fact that a little time with the query planner and some indexes could have probably gotten performance back to where it should have been. Barry saw this problem and decided: "I'll write a Python script".
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by Lyle Seaman on (#74HKR)
There is no particular theme this week, except that Ihave noticed many of these contributors are providing "customized"email addresses. This is a practice which I too havefollowed, to detect who is selling my email address tospammers. I would use a consistentlogin id for many web sites, and a decent password generatedby a mental algorithm, with a unique email address for each site.It worked great until some website wanted to know specificallywhat "my" email address is, and I couldn't remotely rememberwhich of 300 variant email addresses I had signed up fortheir services with.First up, Martin is traveling by air."I have heard it's so beautiful this time of year, so I lookforward to visit @arrCity_SLPH." Martin helpfully explains "First sentence is in Danish: Your SAS-booking has been confirmed."
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by Remy Porter on (#74GNS)
Amity sends us a "weird" replacement, and I regret to inform you, it's not as weird as it should be.
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by Remy Porter on (#74FTA)
A few holiday seasons ago, Paul S was doing the requisite holiday shopping online, looking for those perfectly impersonal but mildly thoughtful gifts that many companies specialize in. This was one of the larger such vendors, well known for its fruit-filled gift baskets. As is not uncommon for our readers, when the site started misbehaving, he pulled up the dev tools. He didn't solve the problem, but he did learn a lot about how they were managing their API keys, as this was exposed to the client:
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by Remy Porter on (#74EXM)
Today, it's not exactly the code that was bad. For some time, a government agency had been collecting information from users using fillable PDF forms. The user would submit the form, and then a data entry clerk would copy the text from the form into a database. This, of course, raised the question: why was someone manually riding the copy/paste button?Sally was tasked with automating this. The data is already in a digital format, so it should be easy to use a PDF library to parse out the entered data and insert it into the database. And it almost was.Sally shares with us, not code, but the output of her program which scanned the fields, looking for their names:
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by Remy Porter on (#74E60)
It is eminently reasonable for companies to have "readability standards" for their code. You're writing this code for humans to read, after all, at least in theory. You need to communicate to future inheritors of your code.But that doesn't mean readability standards are good. Tony's company, for example, has rules about returning boolean values from functions, and those rules mean you are expected to write code like this:
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by Lyle Seaman on (#74CBG)
In only a handful of years, four Liverpudlian scruffs clawed theirway from obscurity to unprecedented worldwide celebrity.
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by Ellis Morning on (#74BJT)
Read (Part One here)When Ellis awoke on Sunday, the unusual cold broke through her drowsiness right away. Her new thermostat was programmed to maintain a lower temperature overnight, but at 6:30AM, it was supposed to climb again, kicking the heat on right when she got out of bed.Why was it so cold? Why was the furnace dead silent? Something must've gone wrong again. So soon?It sucked to get out of bed when it was dark and cold, but Ellis had no choice. She forced herself to peel back the covers and launch into her morning routine. Her cat shadowed her, helpfully letting her know several times that his plate had no food on it.She attended to the cat's needs first before approaching the thermostat downstairs. The set point was at the overnight setting even though it claimed to be following her programmed schedule. Using the touchscreen interface, she increased the set point manually. The heat cut on just fine from there, thank goodness.Through her dehydrated, hungry, uncaffeinated haze, Ellis suddenly remembered the time change. They had "sprung ahead" for Daylight Saving Time. Had her new thermostat joined them in this archaic ritual?It had not. Checking its day/time settings, Ellis found the time an hour behind. She pressed her index finger onto the hour, expecting a dial or drop-down or some other such control to appear. Nothing. Hours, minutes, and AM/PM were all fixed. Only the time zone could be changed. It was currently set to EST. Opening the drop-down menu, none of the options she skimmed over looked promising.Her old thermostat (out of support, incompatible with her new HVAC system) had handled time changes all by itself, and had allowed every possible manual adjustment one could wish for. It frustrated Ellis that the latest so-called "smart" thermostat couldn't manage the same despite being hooked up to the Internet at all times.Part of her wanted to keep digging at this, but it was way too early. Ellis was unprepared in every possible way to descend into a troubleshooting rabbit-hole. She had places to be that morning. The heat was working, that was all that really mattered. More importantly, someone from the HVAC company was already scheduled to perform a 1-week follow-up test of her newly-installed system in a couple of days. She could disable the schedule and make manual adjustments until the technician arrived.With HVAC having taken center stage in her brainspace for over a month by that point, Ellis desperately needed to give herself this break.The technician who arrived was equally mystified. He tried a factory reset of the thermostat, which had no effect. It was determined that future time changes would have to be handled manually by toggling the time zone between EST and ... Eastern. An unhelpful label that Ellis' sleepy brain had completely glossed over early on Sunday morning.Annoying, but not the end of the world.Once the technician tested her system (all good, thankfully) and left, Ellis sat down in front of her laptop to check her usual subreddits. Ah, the World Baseball Classic! Someone had posted a highlight reel of her favorite baseball team's best pitcher-arguably the best pitcher on the planet-recording 7 strikeouts in a single game. She opened up the video, eager to watch.Why the hell is Ellis suddenly telling you about sportsball? Because, in an amazing coincidence, she spied the name of the company that had built her new thermostat, right there on the backstop behind home plate!So they had WBC advertising money, but couldn't pony up for a sensible day/time interface. Ellis suspects she's in for an interesting couple of decades ... assuming her new system lasts that long.P.S. Since Ellis has shamelessly segued her way into sportsball, there's something else she wants to share: a new player on her favorite team, Jhostynxon Garcia, is nicknamed The Password.His younger brother Johanfran, also a baseball player, is called The Username. [Advertisement] Utilize BuildMaster to release your software with confidence, at the pace your business demands. Download today!
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by Remy Porter on (#74AQF)
Today's anonymous submitter passes us a single line of JavaScript, and it's a doozy. This line works, but that's through no fault of the developer behind it.
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by Remy Porter on (#749TS)
Capybara James sends us some code which is totally designed to be modular.This particular software accepts many kinds of requests which it then converts into a request for a ListView. This is a perfect example of where to use polymorphism, so you can write one transform method that operates on any kind of request.Let's see how they did it:
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by Remy Porter on (#74937)
Dana sends us a WTF that'll turn your head. She was shopping for new hard drives, and was doing it from her phone, a fairly reasonable tool to use for online shopping these days. She opened the website of one vendor, and it was rotated 90 degrees. Or half-pi radians, for those of us that are more used to sensible units.This was irrespective of any rotation settings on her phone, the website insisted on showing itself in landscape mode. This created quite the unusual appearance when she held her phone in portrait orientation: the browser chrome surrounding the content was in portrait mode, but the page itself was in landscape.Obviously, this is a terrible design choice. But Dana wanted to know more. So she started digging in. There was no sign of this behavior on a desktop, which sure, I'd hope not. Attempting to use wget to download the page caused a 403. Using curl downloaded a JavaScript challenge. Fine, they didn't want bots, but Dana wasn't a bot.Poking around in the network tab of the desktop browser's debugging tools helped Dana learn a few things. First: the line endings in the files were all CRLF, implying that all development happened on Windows machines. Maybe that's not interesting, but in 2026, it feels unusual. Second, the page is setting a PHPSESSID cookie, so clearly the backend is written in PHP. But most important, Dana is able to piece together what she needs to successfully use curl to download the page, once pretending to be a desktop browser, and once pretending to be a mobile browser. With that, she ran a diff to see what changed.The desktop version started with 42 blank lines. The mobile version started with 41. The rest of the pages were substantially the same, with two exceptions. First, the mobile page also added a stylesheet called stylesheet-responsive.css. I assume that name was chosen because irony is dead; nothing about this site is responsive. Second, there was a subtle difference in the body tags.You see, both pages had a body tag like this:
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by Lyle Seaman on (#7476Y)
Here's a weird email but IMO the erorr is just the odd strikethrough.Bill T. explains: "From my Comcast email spam folder. It was smart enough to detect it was spam, but... spam from a trusted sender? And either the delivery truck is an emoji (possible), an embedded image (maybe?), or Comcast is not actually blocking external images." I'd like to see the actual email, could you forward it to us? My guess is that we're seeing a rare embedded image. Since embedding images was the whole point of MIME in the first place, I have found it odd that they're so so hard to construct with typical marketing mass mailers, and I almost never receive them.
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by Remy Porter on (#746CQ)
Today's Anonymous submitter sends us some React code. We'll look at the code and then talk about the WTF:
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by Remy Porter on (#745H8)
Aankhen has a peer who loves writing Python scripts to automate repetitive tasks. We'll call this person Ernest.Ernest was pretty proud of some helpers he wrote to help him manage his Docker containers. For example, when he wanted to stop and remove all his running Docker containers, he wrote this script:
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by Remy Porter on (#744N7)
Every once in awhile, we get a bit of terrible code, and our submitter also shares, "this isn't called anywhere," which is good, but also bad. Ernesto sends us a function which is called in only one place:
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by Ellis Morning on (#743S6)
Our anonymous submitter relates a tale of simplification gone bad. As this nightmare unfolds, imagine the scenario of a new developer coming aboard at this company. Imagine being the one who has to explain this setup to said newcomer.Imagine being the newcomer who inherits it.
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by Lyle Seaman on (#7420D)
First up with the money quote, Peter G. remarks "Hi first_name euro euro euro, look how professional our marketing services are!"
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by Remy Porter on (#7415A)
We mostly don't pick on bad SQL queries here, because mostly the query optimizer is going to fix whatever is wrong, and the sad reality is that databases are hard to change once they're running; especially legacy databases. But sometimes the code is just so hamster-bowling-backwards that it's worth looking into.Jim J has been working on a codebase for about 18 months. It's a big, sprawling, messy project, and it has code like this:
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by Remy Porter on (#7407V)
Today's snippet from Rich D is short and sweet, and admittedly, not the most TFs of WTFs out there. But it made me chuckle, and sometimes that's all we need. This Java snippet shows us how to delete a file:
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by Remy Porter on (#73Z8V)
Agatha has inherited some Windows Forms code. This particular batch of such code falls into that delightful category of code that's wrong in multiple ways, multiple times. The task here is to disable a few panels worth of controls, based on a condition. Or, since this is in Spanish, "bloquear controles". Let's see how they did it.
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by Remy Porter on (#73YEF)
Python is (in)famous for its "batteries included" approach to a standard library, but it's not that notable that it has plenty of standard data structures, like dicts. Nor is in surprising that dicts have all sorts of useful methods, like pop, which removes a key from the dict and returns its value.Because you're here, reading this site, you'll also be unsurprised that this doesn't stop developers from re-implementing that built-in function, badly. Karen sends us this:
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by Lyle Seaman on (#73WEZ)
Pike pike pike pike Pike pike pike.Lincoln KC repeated"I never knew Bank of America Bank of America Bank of America was amongthe major partners of Bank of America."
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by Remy Porter on (#73VJD)
Industrial machines are generally accompanied by "Human Machine Interfaces", HMIs. This is industrial slang for a little computerized box you use to control the industrial machine. All the key logic and core functionality and especially the safety functionality is handled at a deeper computer layer in the system. The HMI is just buttons users can push to interact with the machine.Purchasers of those pieces of industrial equipment often want to customize that user interface. They want to guide users away from functions they don't need, or make their specific workflow clear, or even just brand the UI. This means that the vendor needs to publish an API for their HMI.Which brings us to Wendy. She works for a manufacturing company which wants to customize the HMI on a piece of industrial equipment in a factory. That means Wendy has been reading the docs and poking at the open-sourced portions of the code, and these raise more questions than they answer.For example, the HMI's API provides its own set of collection types, in C#. We can wonder why they'd do such a thing, which is certainly a WTF in itself, but this representative line raises even more questions than that:
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by Remy Porter on (#73TP5)
I've had the misfortune of working in places which did source-control via comments. Like one place which required that, with each section of code changed, you needed to add a comment with your name, the ticket number, and the reason the change was made. You know, the kind of thing you can just get from your source control service.In their defense, that policy was invented for mainframe developers and then extended to everyone else, and their source control system was in Visual Source Safe. VSS was a) terrible, and b) a perennial destroyer of history, so maybe they weren't entirely wrong and VSS was the real WTF. I still hated it.In any case, Alice's team uses more modern source control than that, which is why she's able to explain to us the story of this function:
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by Remy Porter on (#73SRS)
Henrik H's employer thought they could save money by hiring offshore, and save even more money by hiring offshore junior developers, and save even more money by basically not supervising them at all.Henrik sends us just one representative line:
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by Ellis Morning on (#73RTK)
The utility closet Ellis had inherited and lived with for 17 years had been a cesspool of hazards to life and limb, a collection of tangible WTFs that had everyone asking an uncaring god, "What were they thinking?"Every contractor who'd ever had to perform any amount of work in there had come away appalled. Many had even called over their buddies to come and see the stunning mess for themselves:
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by Lyle Seaman on (#73Q20)
...sent us five wtfs. And so on anon.Item the first, an anon is "definitely not qualified" for this job. "These years of experience requirements are getting ridiculous."
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by Remy Porter on (#73P63)
Antonio has an acquaintance has been seeking career advancement by proactively hunting down and fixing bugs. For example, in one project they were working on, there was a bug where it would incorrectly use MiB for storage sizes instead of MB, and vice-versa.We can set aside conspiracy theories about HDD and RAM manufacturers lying to us about sizes by using MiB in marketing. It isn't relevant, and besides, its not like anyone can afford RAM anymore, with crazy datacenter buildouts. Regardless, which size to use, the base 1024 or base 1000, was configurable by the user, so obviously there was a bug handling that flag. Said acquaintance dug through, and found this:
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by Remy Porter on (#73N9G)
While I'm not hugely fond of ORMs (I'd argue that relations and objects don't map neatly to each other, and any ORM is going to be a very leaky abstraction for all but trivial cases), that's not because I love writing SQL. I'm a big fan of query-builder tools; describe your query programatically, and have an API that generates the required SQL as a result. This cuts down on developer error, and also hopefully handles all the weird little dialects that every database has.For example, did you know Postgres has an @> operator? It's a contains operation, which returns true if an array, range, or JSON dictionary contains your search term. Basically, an advanced "in" operation.Gretchen's team is using the Knex library, which doesn't have a built-in method for constructing those kinds of queries. But that's fine, because it does offer a whereRaw method, which allows you to supply raw SQL. The nice thing about this is that you can still parameterize your query, and Knex will handle all the fun things, like transforming an array into a string.Or you could just not use that, and write the code yourself:
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by Remy Porter on (#73MET)
Arguably, the worst moment for date times was the shift from Julian to Gregorian calendars. The upgrade took a long time, too, as some countries were using the Julian calendar over 300 years from the official changeover, famously featured in the likely aprochryphal story about Russia arriving late for the Olympics.At least that change didn't involve adding any extra months, unlike some of the Julian reforms, which involved adding multiple "intercalary months" to get the year back in sync after missing a pile of leap years.Speaking of adding months, Will J sends us this "calendar" enum:
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by Remy Porter on (#73KS7)
A good C programmer can write C in any language, especially C++. A bad C programmer can do the same, and a bad C programmer will do all sorts of terrifying things in the process.Gaetan works with a terrible C programmer.Let's say, for example, you wanted to see if an index existed in an array, and return its value- or return a sentinel value. What you definitely shouldn't do is this:
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by Lyle Seaman on (#73HZ4)
"No browser is the best browser," opinesMichael R. sarcastically as per usual for tdwtf."Thank you for suggesting a browser. FWIW: neither latest Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera work. Maybe I should undust my Netscape."
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by Remy Porter on (#73H20)
It's always good to think through how any given database operation behaves inside of a transaction. For example, Faroguy inherited a Ruby codebase which was mostly db.execute("SOME SQL") without any transactions at all. This caused all sorts of problems with half-finished operations polluting the database.Imagine Faroguy's excitement upon discovering a function called db_trans getting called in a few places. Well, one place, but that's better than none at all. This clearly must mean that at least one operation was running inside of a transaction, right?
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