The Daily WTF

CodeSOD: Secure Cryptography: Governments have a difficult relationship with cryptography. Certainly, they benefit from having secure, reliable and fast encryption. Arguably, their citizens also benefit- I would argue that being able to, say, handle… dlvr.it/TDclzn

CodeSOD: Cleaning House: Craig had been an IT manager at an immigration services company for several years, but was ready to move on. And for good reason- Craig had suffered his share of moronic helldesk nonsense and was ready to let someone else deal… dlvr.it/TDZZnF

Error'd: A Dark Turn: You may call it equity, or equinox or whatever woke term you like but you can't sugarcoat what those of us in the North know: the Southern Hemisphere is stealing the very essence of our dwindling days. Sucking out the insolation… dlvr.it/TDTK7h

CodeSOD: A Managed Session: Some time ago, Roald started an internship on a ASP .Net application. It didn't take long to find some "special" code. public string RetrieveSessionString(string sessionName) { try { return Session[sessionName].ToString(); }… dlvr.it/TDR2kw

CodeSOD: String in your Colon: Anders sends us an example which isn't precisely a WTF. It's just C handling C strings. Which, I guess, when I say it that way, is a WTF. while(modPath != NULL) { p = strchr(modPath, ':'); if(p != NULL) { *p++ = '\0'; }… dlvr.it/TDNNWQ

CodeSOD: String Du Jour: It's not brought up frequently, but a "CodeSOD" is a "Code Sample of the Day". Martin brings us this function, entitled StringOfToday. It's in VB.Net, which, as we all know, has date formatting functions built… dlvr.it/TDL56c

CodeSOD: A Clever Base: Mark worked with the kind of programmer who understood the nuances and flexibility of PHP on a level like none other. This programmer also wanted to use all of those features. This resulted in the Base class, from which all… dlvr.it/TDHs4X

Error'd: Nothing Doing: Two this week from our old friend Michael R., or maybe it's one. This week, Michael tells us "I am sure I am running some applications but it seems I am not and those not running have allocated all the memory." Well,… dlvr.it/TDBc27

CodeSOD: Switching the Order: Let's say you had 6 different labels to display. There are many, many ways to solve this problem. Most of them are fine. Some of them are the dreaded loop-switch anti-pattern. Julien unfortunately inherited one of those.… dlvr.it/TD8MZx

CodeSOD: Enumerated Science: As frequently discussed here, there are scientists who end up writing a fair bit of code, but they're not software engineers. This means that the code frequently solves the problem in front of them, it often has issues. … dlvr.it/TD5jsy

CodeSOD: Unique Emails: Once upon a time, a company started a large React application. Like so many such projects, the requirements were vague and poorly understood, the management didn't have any sort of plan, and the developers didn't understand the… dlvr.it/TD3n5V

CodeSOD: Take a Line Break: The number of web applications which need to generate PDFs is too damn high, in my experience. But it's a requirement which continues to exist for a variety of reasons, so we just have to accept it. Derek was accepting of… dlvr.it/TD16jR

Error'd: Home By Another Way: This week, we discover an answer to the question that has eternally plagued us: "is time travel possible?" I won't swear it's the right answer, but it's definitely an answer. But first, Faroguy Chris P. both shared the… dlvr.it/TCvbmx

CodeSOD: Strings go Asplodey: Anton has the joy of doing PHP work using one of the more popular e-commerce platforms. Now, say what you will about PHP, its absolute mess of a root namespace has a function or class for just about everything. You want to… dlvr.it/TCs8ZB

Lowering the Rent Floor: Things weren't looking good for IniOil. It was the 1980s in the US: greed was good, anti-trust laws had been literally Borked, and financialization and mergers were eating up the energy industry. IniOil was a small fish… dlvr.it/TCpdxn

Testing the Juniors: Stefan S has recently joined the ranks of software developers, having taken on his first job as a junior developer. After a few months of on-boarding with Terry, another new developer, they're now both actually getting assigned real… dlvr.it/TClZYk

Best of…: Classic WTF: A Systematic Approach: It's a holiday in the US today, where we celebrate labor and laborers. Enjoy a story of working smarter, not harder, to meet unrealistic deadlines and create a lot more work for someone in the future.… dlvr.it/TCjRX4

Error'd: Coast Star: On a vacation trip this week. The diligent will be able to discover the location with a tiny bit of sleuthing, but I won't be there now. An anonymous traveler reports "I've been trying to contact them but I don't think they check… dlvr.it/TCYxCq

Representative Line: Null Ability: The addition of nullable or optional types to mainstream languages was a net good. It doesn't completely solve the billion dollar mistake, but it makes it far easier to write safe code. For most of us anyway. Sam… dlvr.it/TCWkLw

CodeSOD: IsEmptyOrNullOrNullOrEmpty: Peter was tracking down some bugs, when he found code which looks like this: if (IsEmptyOrNull(myInput)) { // do things that clearly expect myInput to NOT be null or empty } else { throw BadInputException("The input… dlvr.it/TCTTg7