The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Finding the Lowest Value

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2017-07-20

Max’s team moved into a new office, which brought with it the low-walled, “bee-hive” style cubicle partitions. Their project manager cheerfully explained that the new space “would optimize collaboration”, which in practice meant that every random conversation between any two developers turned into a work-stopping distraction for everyone else.

That, of course, wasn’t the only change their project manager instituted. The company had been around for a bit, and their original application architecture was a Java-based web application. At some point, someone added a little JavaScript to the front end. Then a bit more. This eventually segregated the team into two clear roles: back-end Java developers, and front-end JavaScript developers.

35 comments - Last comment @ 18:11

A Pre-Packaged Date

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-07-19

Microsoft’s SQL Server Integration Services is an ETL tool that attempts to mix visual programming (for designing data flows) with the reality that at some point, you’re just going to need to write some code. Your typical SSIS package starts as a straightforward process that quickly turns into a sprawling mix of spaghetti-fied .NET code, T-SQL stored procedures, and developer tears.

TJ L. inherited an SSIS package. This particular package contained a step where a C# sub-module needed to pass a date (but not a date-time) to the database. Now, this could be done easily by using C#’s date-handling objects, or even in the database by simply using the DATE type, instead of the DATETIME type.

19 comments - Last comment @ 15:04

Impersonated Programming

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-07-17

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, I got contracted to show a government office how to build and deliver applications… in Microsoft Access. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. As horrifying and awful as it is, Access is actually built with some mechanisms to actually support that- you can break the UI and behavior off into one file, while keeping the data in another, and you can actually construct linked tables that connect to a real database, if you don’t mind gluing a UI made out of evil and sin to your “real” database.

Which brings us to poor Alex Rao. Alex has an application built in Access. This application uses linked tables, which he wants to convert to local tables. The VBA API exposed by Access doesn’t give him any way to do this, so he came up with this solution…

36 comments - Last comment @ 04:06

Changing Requirements

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-07-13

Requirements change all the time. A lot of the ideology and holy wars that happen in the Git processes camps arise from different ideas about how source control should be used to represent these changes. Which commit changed which line of code, and to what end? But what if your source control history is messy, unclear, or… you’re just not using source control?

For example, let’s say you’re our Anonymous submitter, and find the following block of code. Once upon a time, this block of code enforced some mildly complicated rules about what dates were valid to pick for a dashboard display.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2017-07-18

Questioning Existence

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-07-11

Michael got a customer call, from a PHP system his company had put together four years ago. He pulled up the code, which thankfully was actually up to date in source control, and tried to get a grasp of what the system does.

There, he discovered a… unique way to define functions in PHP:

24 comments - Last comment @ 2017-07-19

Swap the Workaround

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-07-05

Blane D is responsible for loading data into a Vertica 8.1 database for analysis. Vertica is a distributed, column-oriented store, for data-warehousing applications, and its driver has certain quirks.

For example, a common task that you might need to perform is swapping storage partitions around between tables to facilitate bulk data-loading. Thus, there is a SWAP_PARTITIONS_BETWEEN_TABLES() stored procedure. Unfortunately, if you call this function from within a prepared statement, one of two things will happen: the individual node handling the request will crash, or the entire cluster will crash.

31 comments - Last comment @ 2017-07-19

The Agreement

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2017-06-29

In addition to our “bread and butter” of bad code, bad bosses, worse co-workers and awful decision-making, we always love the chance to turn out occassional special events. This time around, our sponsors at Hired gave us the opportunity to build and film a sketch.

I’m super-excited for this one. It’s a bit more ambitious than some of our previous projects, and pulled together some of the best talent in the Pittsburgh comedy community to make it happen. Everyone who worked on it- on set or off- did an excellent job, and I couldn't be happier with the results.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2017-07-18

The Internet of Nope

by Remy Porter in News Roundup on 2017-06-28

Folks, we’ve got to talk about some of the headlines about the Internet of “Things”. If you’ve been paying even no attention to that space, you know that pretty much everything getting released is some combination of several WTFs, whether in conception, implementation, and let’s not forget security.

I get it. It’s a gold-rush business. We’ve got computers that are so small, so cheap, and so power-efficient, that we can slap the equivalent of a 1980s super-computer in a toilet seat. There's the potential to create products that make our lives better, that make the world better, and could carry us into a glowing future. It just sometimes feels like that's not what anybody's actually trying to make, though. Without even checking, I’m sure you can buy a WiFi enabled fidget spinner that posts the data to a smartphone app where you can send “fidges” to your friends, bragging about your RPMs.

40 comments - Last comment @ 2017-07-12