Ever get some special letter, card, or picture from a friend or loved one that you held onto, maybe even taped to your cube or office wall? Is it something you still look at fondly, something that lifts your spirits whenever you're down? Certainly, a thoughtful card or letter is much nicer than a th...

For some godawful reason, people like to explain object oriented concepts via analogy to biological taxonomies. I suppose it's easy to understand an "is-a" relationship (a cat is a mammal), but the down side is you get a complex and increasingly leaky analogy that over-emphasizes the importance of i...

Matias shared a standard sort of flubstituted fail-merge error'd; not really egregious, just routine. "I am {{emotionType}} to hear this." And another mail-not-merged from Reinier B. "When the package from [SELLER] seemed to be lost in the mail, I was very [EMOTIONAL_STATE] with the refund of [AMOUN...

Robert G sends us a WTF from the outside, but I think we can come up with some hypotheses about what actually happened. Robert was traveling by train. For complicated train reasons, the car he was seated on was not actually scheduled to continue with the train he was booked to ride, the replacement ...

A junior dev on the team had a simple question: in Java, how do I correctly read user input from the CLI and act on it? Now, we can wonder about a junior dev not having such basic knowledge, but maybe they're new to Java specifically. Who knows. But Robert's team has a senior on it who "likes to men...

Many years ago, DJ got his start doing odd web development jobs for a low hourly rate. He was only 19 when he got started, and what he lacked in experience he made up for in being cheap to hire. As I said, that was many years ago, and he has since learned a lot. But he still has some code from his v...

Today's anonymous submitter sends us some legacy Java code. The task is this: check what time it is. And fortunately, even in the older Java datetime libraries that were terrible, this was an easy task. You just needed to do something like new Date(), which constructs a date time object set to the c...

We have for you this week a full set of the Error'd we most love to hate: the perverse password policy. An anonymous reader drops this, with little to say except to note "Speciaal passwords". Evidently they supplied a password which satisfied each of the five green critera, but still it was rejected...

Today's anonymous submitter shares with us the function their company uses to validate authentication tokens. public bool IsTokenValid(string token) { //TODO return true; } This is running in production. So that's fun. The user they've authenticated as is tracked separately at the start of their ses...

Fritz's team needed to see if one point was within a certain distance from a center point. You or I would likely try and answer this question using a simple distance calculation, since that's the question we're trying to answer. But what if you didn't understand distances at all? Then you could writ...

Nikolai M's team had a flaky CI/CD build. About 0.5% of the time, one of their tests would fail: frequent enough to be annoying, but not so frequent that it motivated management to assign anybody to investigate. Nikolai eventually dug in, taking the initiative. Microsoft's implementation of UUIDs ca...

Our submitter Tim C. is back as his bureaucratic nightmare continues. Read Part 1 here. After I'd thrown the WTF Exchange (WTFX) for a loop, they managed to eventually right the ship. But then I faced another hurdle: I had run out of disk space. The software was not live, we were still developing th...

I know it's not nice to mock mistranslations, but would you believe we're laughing with them, not at them? In response to recent criticism of the difficulty of identifying precisely what is at issue, two of our readers have chosen to highlight the offending element. Thanks for saving me the trouble!...

Tim inherited a fairly antique Visual Basic application some time back. Yes, Visual Basic, not VB .Net. The application is old enough that we might consider it "vintage" or "historical"; it certainly dates from before the millennium. But it has its own unique approach to handling historical dates: m...

Our submitter Tim C. shares his tale of an especially brutal culture clash: I had co-founded a software startup doing stock market surveillance. In the early 2000s, the WTF Exchange (WTFX) was a major customer of ours. We were one part of a major project of theirs, a complete overhaul of their tradi...

David C sends us a true confession. For my job, I write C++ code as if it was a scripting language (long story) to produce programmatic animations for videos. Given that these are "write-and-run-once-and-never-look-at-it-again" programs, I tend to not try as hard to make my code good. But once I wro...

On July 10 2026, a life insurance company called TruStage had a "cybersecurity incident". According to an update posted five days later, when they revealed the incident, they are "continuing to work carefully and urgently to understand the facts, and the company will communicate appropriately as its...

It seems like only yesterday we were mocking the AIs for their limits, and tomorrow they're going to be mocking ours. In the meantime, here's a look back at some humorous moments from the last year or so. "Mathing is hard" wrote Timothy W. "I for one welcome our new AI overlords." "AI is replicating...

Today we have more of a representative comment, from Watson. This comes from some GPL licensed code published by everybody's favorite evil empire, Oracle. /* * Copyright (c) 2011, 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 ...

Autoformatting your code is a standard thing to do these days. And in those days past, if we're being honest. There's no excuse to not use some kind of autoformatter. Whether you configure your editor to do it or are a weirdo like me who runs a formatter from the CLI as a build step, you've got an e...

Let's say we wanted to query Active Directory and print out a report of all of our users, and their last logon time. That seems like a pretty normal task for a Powershell script. It'd probably be short and easy to read, at least if it were written by a normal person. Alice sends us one that wasn't. ...

In addition to using an ancient development environment, with terrible UX, Greta also has the misfortune of working in Pascal. Recently, she was diagnosing a bug. The program was reporting that files didn't exist when they definitely existed. She traced the problem down into the system library. Let'...

Some new and some old entries this week, from people who find zero profoundly unrewarding. "A scary blue button from The North Face" warns Dmitry K.. "Northface has just proudly rewarded me with nothing. I am not sure whether I want to try adding such a non-positive amount to my wallet. I am afraid ...

I'm not a DNS person, in that I appreciate that it exists but am not up on the inner workings. It solves a lot of problems with dark magic I don't fully understand, and fortunately don't need to. But Lucio noticed something that I do think is interesting, within the scope of the CAA record type. The...

Eri has a mix of a "true confession" and a "wait, really?" today. The programming language Vala bills itself as a C# like language that compiles into something pretty close to C performance, designed specifically for writing code against Gnome and its associated libraries. One of the C#-isms in brin...

From our anonymous submitter: Having reached the end of the road at a company increasingly swallowed up companies further east which you'd never believe were still afloat, I found myself headhunted for certain specialty software skills. I was reaching the final few years of my expected working span,...

It's a holiday here in the US, a celebration of labor, so we're reaching back through the archives for a story about an attempt to be labor saving that was not successful. Original. --Remy I’ve had to write a few domain-specific-languages in the past. As per Remy’s Law of Requirements Gathering, it’...

Astute readers noticed last week that this editor (that is to say, me) had his own error'd failure to remember what day it was. Thank you for pointing it out promptly, and then proceeding to send in a bunch of examples of other sites calendar failures. Misery loves company! Traveler's travails, from...

A common option for retrofitting heating and cooling into older homes is a mini-split, frequently tied to a heat pump. They're (relatively) cheap to install, energy efficient, and can be added without substantial modifications to the home. They also, annoyingly, are mostly controlled via IR remotes,...

Rachel joined a new team which was proudly "metrics driven". When she first met with her boss, Zane, he explained his thinking. "We need to be data-driven to make good decisions, right? We're a manufacturing company. We make widgets. At the end of the day, we need to make the most widgets for the lo...