Today, we look at a "representative comment" from Mark W. This particular comment appears on a function: /// <summary> /// Does something wonderful. /// </summary> Well, I'm glad it's wonderful, but are we talking "Christmas magic" wonderful? Or sarcastically droll "Oh, how wonderful for you." wonde...

Windows Presentation Foundation, the XML-based UI framework for Windows, has its own "fun" quirks. One of its core ideas is that controls can be data-bound: that text box is linked to a numeric field in your model class. Type a different number, and the model automagically updates. That's fine for w...

One minute, you’re fine. The next, you’re doubled over with tears spilling down your face while an aching black hole in your heart threatens to drag you into oblivion. Grief’s funny like that. Aggie Shaw, my old friend and mentor, had died of a sudden illness at home. She’d lived alone. Who found he...

"Watch to the end", the scammers demand. In today's episode of Error'd, the end is a long time coming. But at least it's amusing. In the meantime, Amazon irked and/or terrified thousands of their customers last week by mailing out ridiculously inflated bills. It's been covered extensively elsewhere ...

Honestly, with the wildfire smoke and the oppressive heat, maybe it's time to find a nice quiet cave to hang out in. Something with no natural light and no natural ventilation. I wonder if anybody has a place like that… Original. --Remy In the long ago, wild-west days of the late 90s, there was an e...

It's been pretty hot lately. Probably should use a fan to cool off. Mind the trip hazards. Original. --Remy "It's that time of year again," Robert Rossegger wrote, "you know, when the underpowered air conditioner just can't cope with the non-winter weather? Fortunately, we have a solution for that.....

We keep our summer break going. Today, there's something floating in the pool, and I don't think it's a Snickers bar. Original. --Remy A few years back, Adam C. was brought in to help with some performance problems that appeared while load testing a VXML Platform. The project was already well behind...

It's summer break time, which as always, means we dip back into classic articles. Today, we pick which table we want. Original. --Remy "In my native language of German," writes Christian, "the word quellcode is a pretty direct translation of 'source code'." "Unfortunately, bad code seems to cross la...

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...