The Daily WTF
From Wikipedia, the free 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!?’” [1] and “recounts tales of disastrous development, from project management gone spectacularly bad to inexplicable coding choices.”[2]
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”[3] and has introduced several anti-patterns, including Softcoding[4] and the Inner-Platform Effect.[5]
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[edit] Olympiad of Misguided Geeks
Olympiad of Misguided Geeks at Worse Than Failure (abbr. OMGWTF) was a programming contest to “solve an incredibly simple problem using the most obscenely convoluted way imaginable”.[6] 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[7] and received over 350 submissions[8] which were then judged by popular technology bloggers Raymond Chen, Jeremy Zawodny and Joel Spolsky.[9]
The winning entry was Stephen Oberholtzer’s “Buggy 4-Function Calculator”,[10][11] 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.”
[edit] Notable Guest Appearances
In addition to the mostly anonymous stories, several prominent figures have written stories they’ve encountered in their professional experience:
- Blake Ross wrote of the failure of Netscape 7[12]
- Thomas Kyte discussed the worst AskTom he’d ever seen[13]
- Raymond Chen shared some rather peculiar code[14]
[edit] History
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This section may contain an inappropriate mixture of prose and timeline. |
On 17 May 2004 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.[15] 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.[16] A few days later, he registered TheDailyWTF.com domain name and began posting stories from readers of the site.
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”.
On 24 February 2007 the site was renamed “Worse Than Failure” 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.[17] This was not without controversy, and some readers threatened to stop reading the site because of this.[18]
On December 11, 2007, the name was changed again to “The Daily Worse Than Failure” due to pressure from people who liked the old name better. The filename for this name was “logo_joke.gif”.[19]
On December 12, 2007, the original “The Daily WTF” name was restored.[20]
[edit] References
- ^ ACM Queue vol. 3, no. 6 - July/August 2005
- ^ “Cool Developer Tricks: Coding Catastrophes”, Redmond Developer News, April 15, 2007
- ^ Web Development Resources Websites - 2006
- ^ Soft Coding
- ^ The Inner-Platform Effect
- ^ The OMGWTF Programming Contest
- ^ OMGWTF FAQ
- ^ “Going Through the Entries...”
- ^ OMGWTF Judges
- ^ Entry #100043: Buggy 4-Function Calculator - OMGWTF Programming Contest
- ^ Olympiad of Misguided Geeks Announces Winners of 'Worst Software' Creative Coding Contest
- ^ Blake Ross on Popup Suppression
- ^ Tom Kyte on The Ultimate Extensibility
- ^ Raymond Chen on Sleep() Deprivation
- ^ First WTF - Your Daily Cup of WTF
- ^ Comment on Papadimoulis’s Blog suggesting to start a new site
- ^ Announcement: Website.RenameTo(“Worse Than Failure”)
- ^ Comment On Announcement: Website.RenameTo(“Worse Than Failure”)
- ^ Announcement: 2007 Survey Results & Site Changes - The Daily WTF
- ^ Announcement: A New, New, New Name! (2007-12-12). Retrieved on 2007-12-12.
