Do any of the WTFers every recognise their code here?



  • Just looking at From Three Days to 15 Minutes and wondered whether there have been many cases in the past of the original WTFer recognising his/her code and freaking out on these fine pages?

    That's a great article, and a huge multi-layered WTF, but I can imagine if The Abstractor (the villain of the piece) recogised themselves on this site then they would likely become apoplectic about apparently being ridiculed in public, especially when they are convinced that what they wrote was top-notch

    Have there been cases in the past (and links would be lovely :D) where an irate person has come on shouting "Dave! Dave - I know that's you Dave! I'm going to get you fired for this! Remember I'm the President's daughter and he thinks my code is way better than yours!"?



  • Every so often, I'm suspicious that a poster has stumbled upon some of my early work.  I can't imagine there are many of us who haven't generated a WTF or two in our time.  Some of us still create them on a dialy basis. Personally, I'm supporting a monstrous VB6 application where the predominant coding paradigm is trial-and-error.

    I doubt that someone with a resume as impressive as The Abstractor would be reading this site, however.

    There was somebody recently who recognized a WTF as his own, but it turned out to be someone else entirely.  Once a post gets filtered through the TDWTF storytime filter, it could be anyone.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    I think there was something in the sidebar once where blakeyrat (?) had filed a bug report or something (or maybe it was just a garden variety rant) where the dev showed up and engaged the denizens. There was definitely the Lotus Notes guy who showed up after blakeyrat started ragging on him on twitter (not quite what you were thinking of). He was a lot of fun.



  • @boomzilla said:

    He was a lot of fun.
     

    You have a most remarkable definition of fun.



  • There was that Sketchers website. Dev showed up and engaged in discussion about why the did the fucked up things that the did.



  • None of my code isn't here.

    :o(



  • The sketchers thread is hilarious - at least the head dev seemed to take it in good stead!



  • I've had a couple news stories I could almost have sworn were about my company, except we're a small company and I'm the only TDWTF'er and I know I didn't submit it. WTFs fall into patterns, and as such sometimes you see something you think you recognize.



  •  Sometimes I'm shocked that none of my code has ever shown up here.  



  • @sprained said:

     Sometimes I'm shocked that none of my code has ever shown up here.  





    Ditto. I thought I saw some of mine, once, but it turned out I actually just had my compiler open.



  • Tee hee



  • I've posted some of my atrocities from my youngster days before.



  • I can think of three programs I wrote which would be right at home on the front page. One I posted my own sidebar thread about, and the other two are WTF-y 75% due to me writing them during three months of mandated 60-hour weeks (the other 25% due to an incompetent system analyst adding requirements the client didn't really need). I doubt I could ever get to the root cause of that one since I wasn't privy to the negotiations between the PM and client that led to the 60-hour decision.

    I did get a few lovely fat paychecks from all the 1.5x overtime, so that was nice at least.

    That said, with my departure I think the only people who read TDWTF at my last job are SA's, so I doubt any of them will ever be submitted.



  •  I am generally ashamed about most of the JavaScript code that I have in production at the moment. We have a shitty release cycle, and I know better now but my changes are sitting in TFS slowly rotting.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    I know of a case where someone took some code that I wrote for one purpose, used it to do something substantially different, and then farmed it out to a spin-off company that tried to support it without ever fixing the broken assumptions. One decade later, I hear that the company has gone bust and that the pattern of problems the people doing support of the code matches very closely something I sometimes use in throw-away code…

    I'm very glad I signed a “I officially forget all about this” agreement back when it was all spun out to a bunch of suckers group fine commercial entrepreneurs; they can't ask me clean up the mess.

    Nobody's written that up here yet though.



  • @boomzilla said:

    I think there was something in the sidebar once where blakeyrat (?) had filed a bug report or something (or maybe it was just a garden variety rant) where the dev showed up and engaged the denizens. There was definitely the Lotus Notes guy who showed up after blakeyrat started ragging on him on twitter (not quite what you were thinking of). He was a lot of fun.

    I read that thread in it's entirety, and I'm still hoping against hope he comes back for a second round.

    I'm the first point of contact for any/all Lotus Notes problems in a company of thousands. I have words for him.

    On topic, I've submitted an email message to TDWTF, for an update of an Outage (an entire site was down). The only information in the update? A cat was found in the server room and might have caused the problem. I did not send that update out, however.



  • @Adanine said:

    I read that thread in it's entirety, and I'm still hoping against hope he comes back for a second round.

    I'm the first point of contact for any/all Lotus Notes problems in a company of thousands. I have words for him.

    I actually had a plan to bring him back. I fabricated a story about a medium-size AU company who did a Notes migration and desperately needed a consultant. I was going to create a Twitter and another TDWTF account, so I could lead him on (I even knew what images I wanted to use for Twitter and TDWTF.) Then I'd post something on Twitter using the proper hashtags, with a link to my TDWTF thread. The main problem I had is I didn't really know what to do with him when I got him here. I was going to try to string him a long for awhile, throwing god-awful Notes problems at him and trying to get him to publicly solve them for me, all with the promise of a big contract down the road. But I didn't know enough about Notes to really pull it off.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @Adanine said:

    I read that thread in it's entirety, and I'm still hoping against hope he comes back for a second round.

    I'm the first point of contact for any/all Lotus Notes problems in a company of thousands. I have words for him.

    I actually had a plan to bring him back. I fabricated a story about a medium-size AU company who did a Notes migration and desperately needed a consultant. I was going to create a Twitter and another TDWTF account, so I could lead him on (I even knew what images I wanted to use for Twitter and TDWTF.) Then I'd post something on Twitter using the proper hashtags, with a link to my TDWTF thread. The main problem I had is I didn't really know what to do with him when I got him here. I was going to try to string him a long for awhile, throwing god-awful Notes problems at him and trying to get him to publicly solve them for me, all with the promise of a big contract down the road. But I didn't know enough about Notes to really pull it off.

    I think Blakey actually keeps in regular contact with him via Twitter IIRC. That might be a lot easier.

    But you bait him, I'll bug him.



  • @Adanine said:

    I think Blakey actually keeps in regular contact with him via Twitter IIRC.

    ... where do you people get this shit about me? Is there some site like, "hidden-database-about-blakeyrat-with-wrong-info.com" or something? WTF.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @Adanine said:
    I think Blakey actually keeps in regular contact with him via Twitter IIRC.

    ... where do you people get this shit about me? Is there some site like, "hidden-database-about-blakeyrat-with-wrong-info.com" or something? WTF.

    At the time when I was reading the thread, your twitter was linked. I clicky clicky, and there's recent activity between the two. He had the same picture as his TDWTF avatar at least, but I may have remembered wrong.



  • My company is the one that generated this article (although in our defense, much of the alleged WTF-ery is erroneous or misleading, and most of the rest is highly outdated).



  • @skotl said:

    Just looking at From Three Days to 15 Minutes and wondered whether there have been many cases in the past of the original WTFer recognising his/her code and freaking out on these fine pages?
    No, but I do recognise certain anti-patterns. Like the Abstractor, I had the tendency a few years back to make everything an interface, and then provide a factory that gave you an implementation of that interface, even if there was no need to abstract. "Future expansion", sure.

    Sometimes I still do some seriously complex stuff, like configuration objects that get automagically loaded and parsed from a configuration file, with a lot of reflection under the bonnet. But then it would be in a small library that is used by all of our applications, and it removes the need for configuration file parsing in our applications, and provides a consistent interface for both developers and support teams. The end result is greater overall simplicity.

    In my view, software should be simple. If it's not simple, you have to split it into several smaller, simpler parts. If you can't, you have to seriously ask yourself whether you're on the right track.

     



  • @blakeyrat said:

    hidden-database-about-blakeyrat-with-wrong-info.com

    Alright, which one of you assholes told him??



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    hidden-database-about-blakeyrat-with-wrong-info.com

    Alright, which one of you assholes told him??

    Should probably change the date on the Lotus Notes entry to 1-3 months ago. Check the IRC channel's logs for the exact date.



  • @skotl said:

    Have there been cases in the past (and links would be lovely :D) where an irate person has come on shouting "Dave! Dave - I know that's you Dave! I'm going to get you fired for this! Remember I'm the President's daughter and he thinks my code is way better than yours!"?
    Well, there has been Payback's Payback, the end of the Payback saga.


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