The Daily WTF
Encyclopedia
The Daily WTF is a humorous blog dedicated to “Curious Perversions in Information Technology”. The blog, run by Alex Papadimoulis, “offers living examples of code that invites the exclamation ‘WTF!?’” (What The Fuck!?) and “recounts tales of disastrous development, from project management gone spectacularly bad to inexplicable coding choices.”
In addition to horror stories, The Daily WTF “serve[s] as [a] repositor[y] of knowledge and discussion forums for inquisitive web designers and developers” and has introduced several anti-patterns, including Softcoding
, the Inner-Platform Effect
, and IHBLRIA (Invented Here But Let's Reinvent It Anyway).
The site also has an associated "Edition Française", a French-language edition headed up by Jocelyn Demoy, launched in March 2008, as well as a Polish edition.
The content of the site kept evolving, and the body of articles was split into several columns. On 2 November 2006 Papadimoulis starting running code samples as articles entitled the “Code Snippets of the Day”, “CodeSOD” for short. Originally edited by Tim Gallagher, the column was taken over by Derrick Pallas (now the sole editor of CodeSOD) as well as Devin Moore and Mike Nuss on 2 January 2007. On 12 February 2007 Jake Vinson started a new column, “Error'd”, based on the old monthly series “Pop-Up Potpourri”.
The site was renamed to “Worse Than Failure” on 24 February 2007 because “'Daily' and 'What The F*' didn’t quite describe it anymore”. Alex also did not enjoy explaining the meaning “WTF” to people unfamiliar to the phrase, as it contains profanity. This was not without controversy, and some readers threatened to stop reading the site because of this. The change was reverted on December 12, 2007 , after a short and tongue-in-cheek stint as “The Daily Worse Than Failure”.
) was a programming contest to “solve an incredibly simple problem using the most obscenely convoluted way imaginable”. It was started by Alex Papadimoulis because he wanted “to try out something new on [the] site.” Contestants for the OMGWTF contest were encouraged to focus on writing “clever code” (code which is unconventional and solves a problem that may or may not be solvable with conventional means) as opposed to “ugly code” (single letter variable names, no subroutines, and so on).
The goal of the first (and so far, only) contest was to “implement the logic for a four-function calculator.” It ran from 24 April 2007 to 14 May 2007 and received over 350 submissions which were then judged by popular technology bloggers Raymond Chen, Jeremy Zawodny
and Joel Spolsky
.
The winning entry was Stephen Oberholtzer’s “Buggy 4-Function Calculator”, which, according to judge Joel Spolsky “best exemplifies what real-world code looks like ... [it’s] not just bad code, [it’s] believable bad code.” In addition to “a High-Resolution JPEG
of an Official Olympiad of Misguided Geeks at Worse Than Failure First Prize Trophy,” the winner received his “choice of a 15″ MacBook
Pro or Sony VAIO
VGN-SZ430N/B.”
In addition to horror stories, The Daily WTF “serve[s] as [a] repositor[y] of knowledge and discussion forums for inquisitive web designers and developers” and has introduced several anti-patterns, including Softcoding
Softcoding
Softcoding is a computer coding term that refers to obtaining a value or function from some external resource, such as a preprocessor macro, external constant, configuration file, command line argument or database table...
, the Inner-Platform Effect
Inner-platform effect
The inner-platform effect is the tendency of software architects to create a system so customizable as to become a replica, and often a poor replica, of the software development platform they are using...
, and IHBLRIA (Invented Here But Let's Reinvent It Anyway).
The site also has an associated "Edition Française", a French-language edition headed up by Jocelyn Demoy, launched in March 2008, as well as a Polish edition.
History
The website was started on 17 May 2004, when Papadimoulis posted an entry entitled "Your Daily Cup of WTF" on his blog as a means of simply complaining about the quality of development at his then current employer. On his third such post, a reader of his blog suggested that he start a new website dedicated exclusively to such humorous “bad code” postings. A few days later, he registered TheDailyWTF.com domain name and began posting stories from readers of the site.The content of the site kept evolving, and the body of articles was split into several columns. On 2 November 2006 Papadimoulis starting running code samples as articles entitled the “Code Snippets of the Day”, “CodeSOD” for short. Originally edited by Tim Gallagher, the column was taken over by Derrick Pallas (now the sole editor of CodeSOD) as well as Devin Moore and Mike Nuss on 2 January 2007. On 12 February 2007 Jake Vinson started a new column, “Error'd”, based on the old monthly series “Pop-Up Potpourri”.
The site was renamed to “Worse Than Failure” on 24 February 2007 because “'Daily' and 'What The F*' didn’t quite describe it anymore”. Alex also did not enjoy explaining the meaning “WTF” to people unfamiliar to the phrase, as it contains profanity. This was not without controversy, and some readers threatened to stop reading the site because of this. The change was reverted on December 12, 2007 , after a short and tongue-in-cheek stint as “The Daily Worse Than Failure”.
Olympiad of Misguided Geeks
Olympiad of Misguided Geeks at Worse Than Failure (abbr. OMGWTFWTF
WTF may refer to:-Slang:*"what the fuck", -Media and entertainment:...
) was a programming contest to “solve an incredibly simple problem using the most obscenely convoluted way imaginable”. It was started by Alex Papadimoulis because he wanted “to try out something new on [the] site.” Contestants for the OMGWTF contest were encouraged to focus on writing “clever code” (code which is unconventional and solves a problem that may or may not be solvable with conventional means) as opposed to “ugly code” (single letter variable names, no subroutines, and so on).
The goal of the first (and so far, only) contest was to “implement the logic for a four-function calculator.” It ran from 24 April 2007 to 14 May 2007 and received over 350 submissions which were then judged by popular technology bloggers Raymond Chen, Jeremy Zawodny
Jeremy Zawodny
Jeremy Zawodny is an incoming employee of Craigslist, having left Yahoo!'s platform engineering group. He has been described as "Yahoo!'s MySQL guru"....
and Joel Spolsky
Joel Spolsky
Avram Joel Spolsky is a software engineer and writer. He is the author of Joel on Software, a blog on software development. He was a Program Manager on the Microsoft Excel team between 1991 and 1994. He later founded Fog Creek Software in 2000 and launched the Joel on Software blog...
.
The winning entry was Stephen Oberholtzer’s “Buggy 4-Function Calculator”, which, according to judge Joel Spolsky “best exemplifies what real-world code looks like ... [it’s] not just bad code, [it’s] believable bad code.” In addition to “a High-Resolution JPEG
JPEG
In computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....
of an Official Olympiad of Misguided Geeks at Worse Than Failure First Prize Trophy,” the winner received his “choice of a 15″ MacBook
MacBook
The MacBook was a brand of Macintosh notebook computers built by Apple Inc. First introduced in May 2006, it replaced the iBook and 12-inch PowerBook series of notebooks as a part of the Apple–Intel transition. Positioned as the low end of the MacBook family, the Apple MacBook was aimed at the...
Pro or Sony VAIO
VAIO
VAIO is a sub-brand used for many of Sony's computer products. Originally an acronym of Video Audio Integrated Operation, this was amended to Visual Audio Intelligent Organizer in 2008 to celebrate the brand's 10th anniversary...
VGN-SZ430N/B.”
Notable guest appearances
In addition to the mostly anonymous stories, several prominent figures have written stories they’ve encountered in their professional experience:- Blake RossBlake RossBlake Aaron Ross is an American software developer who is known for his work on the Mozilla web browser; in particular, he started the Mozilla Firefox project with Dave Hyatt, as well as the Spread Firefox project with Asa Dotzler while working as a contractor at the Mozilla Foundation...
wrote of the failure of Netscape 7 - Thomas Kyte discussed the worst AskTom he’d ever seen
- Raymond Chen shared some rather peculiar code