Sam suggests this Error'd indicates "Disney+ preparing the ground for usage-based billing." I'm intrigued by the idea that Disney might charge by the minute, but I suspect the reality is far more mundane. Silly prices at online shopping sites don't usually make it through the gauntlet here, but I'm ...

Karen was maintaining some specification tests that were flaky. Not extremely flaky, but three or four times out of a thousand, the tests would just fail. The tests were complicated, and some of the operations were timing sensitive, so it wasn't precisely surprising- but the problem was that they we...

Today's submission is less a WTF and more a, "Yeah, that'd annoy me too." Stevie works in a code-base that's largely C, which means function return values are usually used to communicate to status codes. The standard: BOOL success = someFunc(); if (!success) {// handle the error If someFunc returns ...

Jason M sends us some Ruby code. def bv(prop, tv="Yes", fv="No", nv="Not Specified") v = self.send(prop) if v === true tv elsif v === false fv else nv end end The obvious WTF here is the function name and parameter names. AAYFN seems to be the convention here. But it also contains a more Ruby-specif...

There were thousand tickets in the backlog, and I was on the trail of a weird printer issue. I had a suspect, but that wasn't enough to close the ticket. I'm Anonymous. This is my story. Whenever you hit the Print button, a request launches into the ether. “Print one copy of this file, double-sided....

Do you say "a FAQ" or "an eff eh cue"? Peter says eff eh cue I think. "This is a test" Peter G. harrumphed testily. "Create an FAQ with exactly nine entries. Nine? Nine." "I think I spent over $NaN?" said an anonymous. "This was an interesting offer on myminifactory.com with tight expiry date. Didn'...

While a project manager is frequently called upon for their planning ability, the real skill we want from project managers is their ability to communicate. The job of a project manager is to align the team doing the work, with the organization goals driving the work, with the management and leadersh...

TJ inherited a NestJS project. The original developers left the team many years ago, but they've left their mark in the codebase. // ProjectsModule.ts @Module({ controllers: […], providers: […], exports: […], }) export class ProjectsModule {} NestJS is a dependency-injection oriented framework for T...

"Dragoncoder" supports a web application that has a "wait time" for access. I hate that that's a thing, but I recognize that there are real-world constraints where this might make sense. Still, I hate it. But that's not the WTF. var minutes = parseInt( 12 , 10); var time = document.getElementById('w...

As the US took this weekend to celebrate their complicated relationship with tyranny, we reach back through the archives for another story of tyrants. If you think about it, the Declaration of Independence is basically the same thing as quitting without notice. Original --Remy It was Steve's first w...

On the recurring transport beat, this week brings us a handful of wtfs relating to mass transit. Nothing private. "Thank you for traveling with Deutsche Bahn" sneers Philipp H. bitterly, explaining "The German railroad company sadly is famous for often being late and also has lots of other issues. W...

While we talk about bad video game code periodically, we generally avoid it because it's so specialized and while something like fast inverse square root is bad code from a maintainability perspective, it's great code for abusing floating points to make math fast. Işıtan Yıldız sends us a snippet fr...

Today's anonymous submission isn't really a WTF, but it highlights the hardest problem in computer science: naming things. For example, let's say you saw a method called handleRSAPrivateKeyGeneration. You'd likely assume that it generates an RSA private key. More specifically, it accepts a request f...

Everybody has a nemesis. A dark mirror of yourself, a challenge that is everything you hate. If you've ever worked tech-support, you know what that is: printer issues. I'm Anonymous, and you last saw me in the case of The Ghost Cursor. This is my story. As the days marched on, the chill in the air t...

File path separators are a common pain point when writing cross platform software. Of course, not every programming language has a graceful API for handling that. For example, prior to C++ 17, you had to do some #ifdef preprocessor magic to handle that. Which people usually did (or they'd use the Bo...

First up this week is a little story about a fifafail. I do wonder if this was a failure of the television station, or whether there was something more to it than that. Hercules wrote to alert us to these World Cup shenanigans, explaing "At least the flags were correct. And yes, this was live TV. Th...

When Gary was called in for a meeting with a few of his managers- because of course he had several- he thought it was going to be for an "attaboy", because things had been going really well for the past few months. Gary had inherited a mess, and taken over a nightmare application. It was the kind of...

Gretchen's company recently got purchased by Initech. Specifically, they were bought for their dev team, of all things. They had a few software products that were high performers, and Initech wanted that secret sauce. They bought the company, and then split the dev team up and migrated the developer...

Today's anonymous submitter works in finance. I'll let them start the introduction: This is a legacy application that has been running for nearly a decade in production so one could say that it's been thoroughly tested by daily production use and nothing needs changing This is a collection of two C#...

Lillith was integrating some new tools into an existing Ruby on Rails API. The existing API allowed you to send a dry_run flag along with the request, so that you could have the service calculate its changes without applying them. The problem was, the new tool Lillith was integrating could send, in ...

This week we have got a couple of Mathanon's. Maybe they're the same person, maybe they're not, there's really no way to know! Frist anon has a "Numeric fun fact" for us: "Got a form sent from work to express interest in some event. They actually enforced the validation that the answer must be a num...

Today's anonymous submitter has spent a long time toiling through many, many tickets. Their effort has been an attempt to "save" their employer from the disaster left behind by by a highly-paid consultant. As one does, our submitter started with the highest priority tickets with the highest severity...

There's a language out there called "Progress Advanced Business Language" (or "Open Edge Advanced Business Language"). Just hearing that string of words in a sequence tells you you're in for it. It's a verbose, "English-like" programming language. But we're not here to pick on the language. A long t...

If you want to connect to another system, you need to supply credentials. That's a pretty obvious requirement. We can set aside the whole technical challenge of managing those credentials and the security problems various techniques create, and just focus in on: you must supply some credentials to a...

Daniel recently started a new job. His first task was to fetch some data from the database and render it to the user. Easy enough, and there were already wrapper functions around the database to make it easy. He called execute_read, passed it a query, and checked the results. There were no results. ...

This week, friend Adam R. sent in an entry and included with it a link to a short-form YouTube video. Presumably this was a mistake, because I watched that video and the next one and the next one and the next one and after two hours I still haven't got this column ready. I won't share the video link...

A horse can only be so tenderized, but as well established at this point: I don't like Hungarian Notation. Richard G sends us an example of yet more of it, being misused, as well as some bad date handling. That's basically two of the easiest things to complain about, so let's take a look! DateTime s...

Stella (previously) sends us a much elided snippet. The original code is several thousand lines contained in a single try block. But the WTF is pretty clear without seeing all of that: try: # the whole business logic without any exception handling except: print("Fudge") They didn't really say fudge ...

We should always be wary of "(.+)-driven development". Things like test-driven development, or domain-driven development are fine, but they're also frequently approached from a perspective of dogma, which creates its own terrible outcomes. But let's talk about domain-driven development. Without gett...

Today's anonymous submitter sends us a React view that presents some admin options. Of course, it should only show us those admin options if the user is authorized to do that. So let's see how they implemented it: {(isAdmin || canSeeResults) && ( <div> <p>Admin Actions</p> {(isAdmin || canSeeResults...