The Daily WTF

We've all had cow-orker'swhocouldn'tdotheirjobs. Some people have even had the privilege of working with Paula.Jarad should be so lucky.He worked at Initech in a small development group, building a Windows client tool that customers used to interface with their server. One day, they decided to port the app from .NET to Java. The powers-that-be recommended a highly regarded Lead Java Developer, Kiesha, from Intelligenuity, to lead the project. "Don't worry," they said, "Intelligenuity only employs the most brillant programmers."At the first group stand up meeting of the project, their manager announced that they would use Eclipse for the Java project. Kiesha posited "I don't have Eclipse. Could someone please send it to me?" So Jarad sent her the link. At the next stand up, he followed up to ask if she had gotten Eclipse installed. She said "I was blocked because she had been unable to download it, so I waited for the next meeting to ask for help." Their manager jumped on her machine and solved her problem by clicking on the download link for her.Fast forward to the next meeting and she said that she was still unable to proceed because "Eclipse was having some problem with 'JDK' and could someone please send me that?" Jarad sent her that link too. Several days later at the next meeting, she said "Eclipse isn't working because it needs a 'jar' file, so could someone please send one to me?" And after that, "Could someone please send me sample code for doing classes because Eclipse kept saying NullPointerException".Finally the manager changed the meeting structure. They would continue their usual standups for the Windows client, but they would add a separate dedicated meeting with just Kiesha. Eventually, they found out that she and her husband were buddies with a highly placed C** executive and his wife. The separate meeting was to "guarantee that she's successful," which meant their manager was writing the code for her.One day, Kiesha told the manager that a customer was having a critical problem with the web portal, and that it was of the utmost importance that they have a meeting with the customer as soon as possible to help resolve the issue.Their manager set up a meeting with the customer, himself, Kiesha, Jarad, and the project manager to solve it once and for all. The day of the meeting, the customer was surprised at how many support people and managers showed up. The customer explained. "The, um… 'portal problem' is that we asked Kiesha for the URL of the web portal? This could have been an email." Sometimes, there is justice in this world, as Kiesha finally lost her job. [Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!

It was March 2016, and Ian was in need of a job. Fairly early into his search, he was lucky to find a tiny startup in need of someone with Python architecture and design skills. By "tiny," we mean that there were only three other developers working for Jack, the founder.Ian interviewed with Jack directly. After a technical test, he learned more about the company's pet project: a nearly-finished prototype of an iOS app. Once a user synced their phone with a wrist-worn heart rate monitor, the phone would play appropriate music for whatever the user was doing. It was primarily intended to help users reach a target heart rate while exercising. The app also used the phone's accelerometers to track the user's pace as they moved around, data that Jack claimed would be valuable for research into Parkinson's disease. He even had scientific papers from top universities to back up the claim. The prototype application, in its current state, wouldn't scale. Thus, Jack needed Ian to design a new backend system to store data and handle requests.Jack was friendly and personable, and his enthusiasm was contagious. Ian accepted on the spot, and started the next day. His office was cramped, but it was his. He got to work designing the requested backend.Two weeks passed. Then, early on a groggy Monday morning, Jack breathlessly pulled his dev team into a meeting room. The bright light beaming from his Powerpoint presentation drilled into everyone's retinas."I've been doing a lot of thinking," Jack prefaced. "We're a brand new startup. Nobody knows about us, right? We gotta do something to build up name recognition. So, here: we're gonna scrap the music part of the app, and focus solely on data collection."Ian stifled his instinctual What?! Not only were two weeks of work down the drain, but the data collection part of the app was an entirely optional feature at present.Jack flipped to a slide that showed the metrics he was now interested in tracking for each user. There were so many that the tiniest of fonts had been used to fit them all in. Ian squinted to read them."If you build a big enough haystack, a needle will appear!" Jack said. "We'll make the app free so it's a totally opt-in experience. The data we collect is the real prize."Investment capital was spent on posh downtown office space; for free app developers, only the very best would do. Jack also hired a second iOS developer, a data scientist, and an intern."But don't give the intern anything important to do," Jack told the full-timers.Once Ian settled into his new digs, he began architecting a new system that would somehow capture all the required data.Three months later, Jack threw it out. "No apps! We need a new direction!"Jack's new vision was a website where people would sit down and input what songs they listened to when sleeping, exercising, and performing other activities."People love to talk about themselves," Jack said. "They don't need to be paid to give us their data!"A frontend dev was hired to build the website. Soon after it went live, Jack bragged to investors that the website had hit 1 million unique visitors. In reality, the site had handled around 300 submissions, half of which had come from a single person.Three months later, guess what happened? Jack scrapped the faltering website in favor of a Slack bot that would respond to "Play ${song} by ${artist}" by looking it up on Spotify and providing a link. The Spotify widget would play a 30-second preview, or—if the user were logged in with a Spotify Premium account—play the whole song."That's it? How's that going to make any money?" By this point, the developers were no longer holding back their objections."We'll charge a subscription fee," Jack answered, undaunted."For a chat bot?" Ian challenged. "You already need Spotify Premium for this thing to fully work. If we want people to pay more money on top of that, we have to provide more features!""That's something we can figure out later," Jack said.Jack had the intern develop the company's new flagship product, going against the wishes of Jack from six months earlier. The intern gave it his best shot, but soon had to return to school; the unfinished code was unceremoniously tossed into the frontend developer's lap. With help from one of the iOS developers, he finished it off. And what was Ian up to? Setting up monitoring dashboards and logging at Jack's insistence that they'd attract enough users to justify it.Three more months passed. A number of "features" were added, such as the bot nagging users in the Slack channel to use it. As this behavior violated the Slack TOS, they were prevented from putting their app in the app store; Jack had to hand out links to a manual install to interested parties. The product was first given to 50 "super-friendly" companies Jack knew personally, of which only a handful installed it and even fewer kept using it after the first day. Jack then extended his offering to 300 "friendly" companies, with similar results.Ian's breaking point came when Jack insisted he pull overtime, even though there was no way he could help the other developers with their tasks. Nevertheless, Jack insisted Ian stay late with them to "show solidarity." Finally at his wit's end, Ian put in his two weeks. His final day coincided with the general release of the Slack bot, during which he watched a lot of very flat lines on dashboards. When he left the posh office for the last time, the startup still had yet to earn its first cent.Fortunately, Jack had a plan. After Ian left, he scrapped everything to start on fresh on a new product. No, it wouldn't make any money, but they needed name recognition first. [Advertisement] Forget logs. Next time you're struggling to replicate error, crash and performance issues in your apps - Think Raygun! Installs in minutes. Learn more.

We've all been inflicted with completely overdesigned overly generalized systems created by architects managers who didn't know how to scope things, or when to stop.We've all encountered premature optimization, and the subtle horrors that can spawn therefrom.For that matter, we've all inherited code that was written by individuals cow-orkers who didn't understand that this is not good variable naming policy.Jay's boss was a self-taught programmer from way back in the day and learned early on to write code that would conserve both memory and CPU compilation cycles for underpowered computers.He was assigned to work on such a program written by his boss. It quickly became apparent that when it came to variable names, let's just say that his boss was one of those people who believed that usefully descriptive variable names took so much longer to compile that he preemptively chose not to use them, or comments, in order to expedite compiling. Further, he made everything global to save the cost of pushing/popping variables to/from the stack. He even had a convention for naming his variables. Integers were named I1, I2, I3..., strings were named S1, S2, S3..., booleans were named F1, F2, F3...Thus, his programs were filled with intuitively self-explanatory statements like I23 = J4 + K17. Jay studied the program files for some time and had absolutely no clue as to what it was supposed to do, let alone how.He decided that the only sane thing that could be done was to figure out what each of those variables represented and rename it to something appropriate. For example, he figured out that S4 was customer name, and then went through the program and replaced every instance of S4 with customer_name. Rinse and repeat for every variable declaration. He spent countless hours at this and thought that he was finally making sense of the program, when he came to a line that, after variable renaming, now said: account_balance = account_balance - zip_code.Clearly, that seemed wrong. Okay, he must have made a mistake somewhere, so he went back and checked what made him think that those variables were account balance and zip code. Unfortunately, that's exactly what they represented... at the top of the program.To his chagrin, Jay soon realized that his boss, to save memory, had re-used variables for totally different purposes at different places in the program. The variable that contained zip code at the top contained item cost further down, and account balance elsewhere. The meaning of each variable changed not only by code location and context, but also temporally throughout the execution of the program.It was at this point that Jay began his nervous breakdown. [Advertisement] Otter - Provision your servers automatically without ever needing to log-in to a command prompt. Get started today!

Mark J spent some time as a contractor in the Supply & Inventory division of a Big Government Agency. He helped with the coding efforts on an antiquated requisition system, although as he would come to find, his offers to help went unappreciated.

Learning about data structures- when to use them, how to use them, and why- is a make-or-break moment for a lot of programmers. Some programmers master this. Some just get as far as hash maps and call it a day, and some… get inventive.Let’s say, for example, that you’re Jim J’s coworker. You have an object called a Closing. A Closing links two Entrys. This link is directed, so entry 1->2 is one Closing, while 2->1 is another. In real-world practice, though, two Closings that are linked together in both directions should generally be interacted with as pairs. So, 1->2 and 2->1 may not be the same object, but they’re clearly related.Jim’s coworker wanted to gather all the pairs were together, and put them into groups, so 1->2 and 2->1 are one group, while 3->1 and 1->3 are another. This was their approach.

UUIDs and GUIDs aren’t as hard as dates, but boy, do they get hard, don’t they. Just look at how many times they come up. It’s hard to generate a value that’s guaranteed to be unique. And there’s a lot of ways to do it- depending on your needs, there are some UUIDs that can be sorted sequentially, some which can be fully random, some which rely on hash algorithms, and so on.Of course, that means, for example, your UUIDs aren’t sequential. Even with time-based, they’re not in sequence. They’re just sortable.Pitming S had a co-worker which wanted them to be sequential.

Bogdan Olteanu picked up a simple-sounding bug. There was a drop-down list in the application which was missing a few entries. Since this section of the app wasn't data-driven, that meant someone messed up when hard-coding the entries into the dropdown.Bogdan was correct. Someone messed up, alright.

Many years ago, Sebastian worked for a company which sold self-assembled workstations and servers. One of the company's top clients ordered a server as a replacement for their ancient IBM PS/2 Model 70. The new machine ran Windows NT Server 4.0 and boasted an IPC RAID controller, along with other period-appropriate bells and whistles. Sebastian took a trip out to the client site and installed the new server in the requested place: a table in front of the receptionist's desk, accessible by anyone walking through the main entrance. Not the best location from a security standpoint, but one of the new server's primary tasks in life would be to serve the company's telephone directory, installed on CD-ROM.Two weeks later, the client called back, irate over the fact that the new server performed terribly compared to their old one. Troubleshooting efforts via phone were ineffective; the client demanded on-site support. After several frantic conference calls involving Sales, Support, and nosebleed-level management, Sebastian was on a plane back to the client site.Once back within the client's stuffy lobby, he could see that the server setup had in fact changed since he'd last been there, despite the client's repeated insistence to the contrary. Someone had placed both the old and new server boxes under the table. Two CRT monitors sat side-by-side on the table along with their corresponding mice. The keyboards were on a roll-out drawer just under the surface. Both machines were already logged in as administrator, waiting for anyone to come along and not exploit that fact.After checking in with his on-site contact and securing a cup of coffee, Sebastian got to troubleshooting. First thing, he used the mouse to open the Start menu on the new server—but as soon as he released the mouse button, the Start menu collapsed. He tried a few more times with no success.Frowning, Sebastian rolled out the keyboard drawer, hoping to try a keyboard shortcut next. When he did so, he found the keyboards set up one in front of the other. The strain relief on the back of the old server's keyboard was sitting right on top of the space bar of the new server's keyboard. Apparently, it'd been holding down the space bar for the past two weeks straight.Sebastian pulled the old server keyboard onto the table. Sure enough, the new server behaved normally from then on. Thousands of dollars spent, hundreds of miles flown—all to lift one keyboard away from another. [Advertisement] Forget logs. Next time you're struggling to replicate error, crash and performance issues in your apps - Think Raygun! Installs in minutes. Learn more.

If you're reading this message, then it means that I managed to successfully migrate TheDailyWTf.com and the related settings from our old server (74.50.110.120) to the new server (162.252.83.113).Shameless plug: I did all of this by setting up a configuration role in our internally-hosted Otter instance for both old and new servers (to make sure configuration was identical), deploying the last successful build to the new server using our internally-hosted BuildMaster instance, and then manually installing the certificate and configuring the database. Here's what the OtterScript looks like for the server's configuration. I'd love to move this to a publically-hosted instance, soon!

“Hey, apparently, the SSL cert on our web-service expired… in 2013.”Laura’s company had a web-service that provided most of their business logic, and managed a suite of clients for interacting with that service. Those clients definitely used SSL to make calls to that web-service. And Laura knew that there were a bunch of calls to ValidateServerCertificate as part of the handshaking process, so they were definitely validating it, right?

We already know that Kara’s office has a problem with strings. Kara’s back again, with more string related troubles.These troubles are a bit worse, once we add in some history. You see, some of their software does machine control. That is to say, it sends commands to some bit of machinery, which then moves or extrudes or does whatever the machine does. Kara wasn’t specific, only granted that this machine was neither large enough or mean enough to kill someone. Minor cuts, burns, scrapes, bruises and damage to the equipment itself is still possible, but nobody will die.Once upon a time, the bulk of this code was written in C. Then someone wanted a better UI. So that C code got replaced by the perfectly natural solution of… Visual Basic. There’s still some C in there somewhere, hidden behind interops and marshalled calls to native code, but most of the GUI and logic is pure VB.Net. Which brings us to our representative line.

Ah, WordPress. If you hadn't heard of it by reputation, it sounds pretty good: one platform where you can build a blog, an e-commerce site, an app, or some combination of all of the above. Their site is slick, and their marketing copy sounds impressive: "Beautiful designs, powerful features, and the freedom to build anything you want. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time." With WordPress, the hype insists, anyone can build a website without having to know anything about coding. Just pick a template, add free modules, and it'll look great without any effort.If you've worked anywhere remotely connected to web design, you've heard of WordPress, and likely by reputation. The engine has maintained backwards compatibility since day one, which means it's the usual spaghetti system of duct tape and prayers you get when you prioritize backwards compatibility over systems engineering. It was more of a success than the designers intended, having been built solely as a (pretty decent) blogging platform at first, so the more use cases it expands to cover, the worse the learning curve becomes. Many web designers refuse to touch the system at all, preferring to roll something by hand that they understand than to untangle the snarl of "free" modules their clients installed when something goes wrong.Two days before launch, Lukas was nearly done with a contract job: a custom marketing site with a contact form, exactly the kind of thing Wordpress has for Use Case #2. Testing the site before handing it over, he noticed one page loading slowly. VERY slowly. Like, 60 seconds slowly.It seemed odd that a page with only static resources could even be that slow, so he ran a profile on the page:For those of you who don't speak browser profile, that's the CSS engine that's stalling out for a whole minute. Usually, unless you're doing awful things in your CSS or have megabytes worth of it to render, the CSS engine is very fast; the usual culprit in Wordpress is client-side Javascript. But the CSS looked perfectly fine—messy and WordPressy, but fine, once it was all compiled.Searching for answers, Lukas compared the markup on the page to the CSS stylesheet, trying to deduce what it was doing. A fancy heading here, a custom font there ... everything looked normal until he got to the top of the footer area, where he found the totally normal and not at all strange sequence of 131,074 empty paragraph tags.Did I mention WordPress is built in PHP?Some rogue bit of PHP code had gone into a horrible loop, dumping out empty paragraph tags 131,074 times right before the footer element. Pages upon pages of <p> with nary a </p> in sight. Paragraph tags default to display:block, meaning every time the engine gets to one, it causes the browser to execute layout, paint, and composite operations on the rest of the page—including the up to 131,073 other paragraph tags it may have already encountered. And this gnarly bit of nothing began after 1,482 lines of useful HTML, so it wasn't as if the page were tiny to begin with.It gets better: this was all just before the custom footer, which can have inline CSS in WordPress, as it's a quick way to tweak a theme without having to create what's called a "child theme." The client had some inline CSS in place, and yes, it applied to the paragraph tag. It set padding-bottom: 0px !important;, forcing the CSS engine to re-render the entire set of paragraph tags once more.And that's why no matter how good platforms become, no matter how rich the plugin ecosystem, there will always be work for web devs. [Advertisement] Utilize BuildMaster to release your software with confidence, at the pace your business demands. Download today!

Operator overloading is a messy prospect. In theory, it means that you can naturally extend a language so that you can operate on objects naturally. An introductory CS class might have students implement a Ratio or Fraction class, then overload arithmetic operators so you can (a + b).reduce().In practice, it means you use the bitshift operator also as the stream insertion operator. Thanks C++.Java decided to chuck the baby out with the bathwater, and simply didn't allow operator overloading, but this introduced its own challenges. How do I tell if one instance of MyObject type is greater than another instance? That's important if I want to sort these objects, for example.Thus, Java has the Comparator interface. Implement Comparator<MyObject> and now you can compare two instances of that object. The comparator object can be passed to all sorts of built-in methods for sorting, filtering, etc. At least, that's the theory.An anonymous submitter found this unique approach to that problem.

"The hurrider I go, the behinder I get," is one of the phrases I like to trot out any time a project schedule slips and a PHB or PM decides the solution is either crunch or throwing more bodies at the project.Karl had one of those bosses, and ended up in the deep end of crunch. Of course, when that happens, mistakes happen, and everything gets further behind, or you're left with a mountain of technical debt because you forgot that Integer.TryParse was a function in C#.Which is what happened to Karl. And that's why Karl wrote… this.

Ah, the enumerated type. At its core, it's really just a compile-time check to ensure that this constant containing 1 isn't getting confused with this other constant, also containing 1.We usually ignore the actual numbers in our enums, though not always. Perhaps, though, we should just pay more attention to them in general, that way we don't end up with code like Andrew found.

Every "enterprise" shop has that one system you hope you never need to touch. It's older than you are, "documentation" consists of whispers and rumors about its behavior, and it is absolutely 100% business critical. If it goes down, the business goes down.Fortunately, you'll never have to touch that system, because there's an Ancient Wizard who has been sitting in the same cube since 1973, and knows its secrets. As long as the Wizard is around, you'll never touch it. Of course, if the system goes down when the Wizard is out of the office… well, fixing that would require a Christmas miracle.Renee was a programmer-elf in Santa's Workshop. It was a huge organization with many layers of middle-elfagent, so 90% of her job was sitting in pointless meetings with no agenda. In the remaining 10%, she occasionally added features to their in-house legal invoice processing software. Since nearly every present they shipped was an elf-produced knockoff of a large company's trademarks, legal billing was one of the Workshop's largest line items.There were other important IT systems. Supply chain was massive. All raw materials, aside from the naturally-occurring candy canes, had to be imported. Whether it was fabric for producing dolls, or ABS plastic and injection molds for producing dolls action figures. While shipping had a special organizational importance, IT rarely was engaged. The CEC (Chief Executive Claus) had learned to do pivot tables and VLOOKUPs in Excel, and did all his shipment planning himself.The 100% business-critical mystery system was NNOSE: Naughty/Nice Observation and System Evaluator. It was the "source of truth" for the all important TPS reports: Total Presents Sacked. The Ancient Wizard who cared for it was literally an Ancient Wizard, Merlin. And yes, Merlin really was Santa's sidekick. NNOSE ran on a piece of NORAD surplus computer hardware and was programmed in a dialect of MUMPS nicknamed "Sugar LUMPS" or just "LUMPS". Merlin was the only one who knew how the system worked and what the system did, and Merlin was the only one who was ever supposed to touch it.As the clock clicked closer to 12/24, the shipping deadline, the Workshop got busier and busier, while software developers got less and less busy. Since time was critical, no software changes went into production unless there was an absolute show-stopping bug. The software teams basically were on an extended break until the New Year, and no code releases would happen until mid-January at the earliest.So, during the busiest, most critical time of the year, the development team mostly spent their vacation hours. Merlin was out in Avalon, trying to patch things up with his ex. The senior Project Elfagers were on a retreat in Cancun. All through the shop, not a developer was stirring, aside from Renee. Renee loved to work during the quietest time of the year, when no one scheduled any meetings. It was its own kind of vacation…… at least until Hermie, the lead developer who really wanted to be an MBA, popped his head into her cube."NNOSE is down. The Big Guy just tried to pull the final TPS report for the year, and not only did it not have a cover sheet, it printed ten pages of errors instead of data. I've already tried to raise Merlin, but he's not on Slack, and there's no cell service in Avalon."If the TPS report were wrong or unavailable, Santa couldn't accurately match kids up with presents. Naughty kids could get great gifts, nice ones might get useless garbage like an Amazon Echo or Google Home. He needed that report."Okay, but I know the report has been run previously," Renee said. "Can't they just run with an old version?""There aren't any old versions. TPSes get shredded after review, ever since GDPR went into effect."Against her better judgment, Renee set down her hot cocoa and said, "I'll see what I can do."Merlin didn't keep any digital documentation for NNOSE. Everything about the system was stored in binders full of parchment in his cube. Calling the contents "documentation" would be generous. Merlin had written most of it in High Enochian, and what little bits were in Elvish just seemed to be rants and raves about changes management had requested, and how wrong those changes were. The only system diagram was arranged into an Elder Sign. The most useful thing Renee found in her first pass were post-it notes with login credentials for the various bits.Still, it was enough for Renee to start piecing together the system. The TPS report came from data managed by NNOSE, but the mainframe-based CLI interface had been abandoned circa 2002. At that point, someone had purchased an expensive mainframe integration package from Initech, which was basically a way of slapping XML/SOAP webservices on top of existing mainframe code. A few years later, someone had slapped together a VB.NET (framework version 1.0) UI which called into that webservice. The VB.NET program actually extracted and printed the report.Great! Renee kind of knew Visual Basic, or at least could fake it. And it wasn't LUMPS. She started by testing the NNOSE XML interface- she sent a few SOAP requests manually and verified that she got correct output. Then she fired up the VB.NET app. It had a basic UI for setting filters and criteria, but once you hit "run report", everything—even the error messages—went to the printer. Worse, you couldn't tell it what printer to use. Every print went to one printer down in the reindeer stables.Cue the testing cycle of "try running the report, ride the world's slowest elevator to the basement, walk through the reindeer stables, wait for the printer to finish running off its pages of error messages, drag the ream of paper back upstairs and try to match it to the code." Through this process, Renee learned a few important things. First, no matter how Christmas-y and magical reindeer were in spirit, in odor they were more Halloween Horror. Second, for some reason, there were SQL errors showing up in the stack traces. But everything was supposed to be webservices wrapped on mainframes, so why were there database calls?Renee went back to Merlin's binders, and with the help of what little High Enochian she could remember from high school, Renee started to piece together what was happening.Circa 2004, against Merlin's protests, there had been a project code-named RED. The goal of RED was to "upgrade" NNOSE to a full J2EE system with an Oracle backend. If Renee was reading the Enochian correctly, Merlin had banished the elf responsible for contracting the vendor to the Astral Plane, where they were surely captured by Githyanki."Well, that's got to be a violation of HR policies," Renee noted to herself.The project never completed, but progressed to the point where the Oracle backend had been running in parallel with NNOSE ever since. That explained the SQL errors. The VB.NET app had functionality added to talk to the "upgraded" RED system. At some point in its history, the VB.NET app had been pointed to that backend, and had been querying it instead of the mainframe. Sure enough, when Renee logged into Oracle directly, most commands returned errors as something in this more-or-less unmaintained and unpatched Oracle instance was completely FUBAR.Renee poked at the VB.NET app until she figured out how to resurrect the webservice-based data access layer. One more olfactory offense later, and Renee was holding a TPS report. Off it went to Santa, and off she went to give an after action to Hermie."Great work! You've saved Christmas!" Hermie said. "Shame about Merlin, though.""What about Merlin?""Oh, the whole banishing poor Roger to be soulsucked on the Astral Plane. That is absolutely a firing offense, and we're going to have to let Merlin go. Don't worry, though. After this, I'm confident that you can fill in as our new NNOSE and LUMPS expert. You can think of it like a promotion, and maybe in a few years, it'll involve a salary increase!" 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