On the tenth day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me:

Ten WTFs,
Nine giphy’s dancing,
Eight Scrums a-scaling,
Seven most-heard retrospective comments,
Six Keystone config tips,
Five Golden Rules!
Four CI tools,
Three powershell scripts,
Two Keystone merge tips,
…and a placeholder rule in the content tree.

For years, I’ve read The Daily WTF for humourous stories from the field. As a gift to you, here are 10 of the ones from over the years that I personally enjoyed!

1. SQL Injection Prevention

Louis’ organization has some pretty standard coding policies. Two key policies are that database access is allowed only via stored procedures and that all code must be reviewed before being deployed to the testing environment. There’s no exception to this, meaning that everyone’s code, even the highly-paid consultants’ code, must go through review.

Full Article: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/SQL_Injection_Prevention_101

2. The Six Million Dollar Patch Fix

I wish that organizations like this weren’t real…

QA, UAT, and performance tests passed. John received authorization to promote his first major release to production. He checked in the code, and nothing exciting happened. No cake or streamers fell from the ceiling, but no errors or warnings bleated out at him. None. Given the complexity of the product, John’s success was the IT-world equivalent of winning both showcases on “The Price Is Right”.

Full Article: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Six-Million-Dollar-Patch

3. Got Time?

Please program in more days, read the subject of one of Peter’s unread e-mails. As the replacement for Noah, the company’s veteran programmer, Peter was starting to get used to strange-sounding emails requesting simple hacks and tweaks to applications used by their clients. He opened up the message …

Full Article: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Got_Time_0x3f_

4. That’s One Way to Secure It.

Jared L. is our Odysseus in this story. As a fresh college graduate, he landed a good position as a Java webmaster in charge of about 25 web sites. He’d never written a single line of JSP code in his life, but he figured he could pick it up pretty quickly. And during his interview he mentioned that he didn’t have any JSP experience, but they made him an offer anyway — it wasn’t like he’d lied about his experience level.

Full Article: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Thats-One-Way-to-Secure-It

5. The Horrible and Stupid System

After he left, Jared kept in touch with his friend Stephen, who still worked at Initrode. Eager to catch up on how each other were doing, they met for lunch.

Jared saw his friend enter the restaurant and waved him over. “Stephen, how’ve you been?”

“This new guy… he’s terrible.” Stephen decided to forego a greeting, instead launching right into his complaints.

Full Article: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Horrible-and-Stupid-System

6. The CEO’s Sycophant

No one really liked Martin P. This is not to say that Martin was unlikeable per se, it’s just that everyone seemed to have a hard time getting over his unofficial title: the CEO’s sycophant.

In all fairness to Martin, he never really aspired to become the CEO’s sycophant. Or anyone’s sycophant for that matter. He simply saw a job advertisement – Windows Software Engineer – applied for it, interviewed, and accepted the offer.

Full Article: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-CEOs-Sycophant

7. Diseased

It wasn’t Kyle‘s idea of a dream job, but when you have a PoliSci degree your options are either “unpaid slave labor in politics” or “parent’s basement”. So he leveraged the handful of CS classes he had taken as a backup, and managed to talk his way into a job. At the interview, he was shown some Java and VB code, which he was able to talk half-way intelligent about, and he discovered that he’d be working for Steve, his former Little League coach. A judicious application of communication skills and nepotism meant the interview ended with, “Can you start on Monday?”

Full Article: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Diseased

8. The Developers’ Book Club

Technically, it wasn’t so much the shelf that drew his attention, but the passive-aggressive sign written in red, 58-point Chiller. Do Not Take Any of THESE BOOKS, Tal read the words in his head. Code Complete 2… Pragmatic Programmer… what the—

His internal monologue was cut off by another stream of thought. Is this why the code is so terrible? Is someone trying to hoard all of the best practices knowledge? Or is this some harebrained scheme to monopolize all local copies of good programming books?

Full Article: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Developers-Book-Club

9. The Suicide Door

At the university where Diogo worked, the Computer Science program outgrew its status as an unloved child of the Mathematics department. It was to become its own department, and that meant it finally deserved its own building. Since the university in question had a very strong architecture program, the university searched for the biggest names to design the building.

Full Article: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Suicide-Door

10. Psychic Code

I’ve linked to this one for a few years now on my About page…

Like snakes and mongooses , QA and developers are natural enemies. Through an unfortunate series of events, developer Bridget found herself working on a QA team. She was deep in enemy territory, and not full prepared for the rigors of QA, so she focused on her core developer skills. She helped the testers automate things.

Full Article: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Psychic-Code