The Daily WTF

The Daily WTF (also called Worse Than Failure from February to December 2007) 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!?) [2] and "recounts tales of disastrous development, from project management gone spectacularly bad to inexplicable coding choices."[3]

The Daily WTF
Type of site
Software engineering disaster blog
Created byAlex Papadimoulis [1]
URLthedailywtf.com
Registrationoptional
Launched17 May 2004 (2004-05-17)
Current statusactive

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"[4] and has introduced several anti-patterns, including Softcoding,[5] the Inner-Platform Effect,[6] and IHBLRIA[7] (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,[8] as well as a Polish edition.

A running gag in the forums is that the site is the original "WTF", as it doesn't provide even basic search capabilities.

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.[9] 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.[10] 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". Papadimoulis also did not enjoy explaining the meaning "WTF" to people unfamiliar to the phrase, as it contains profanity.[11] This was not without controversy, and some readers threatened to stop reading the site because of this.[12] The change was reverted on December 12, 2007,[13] after a short and tongue-in-cheek stint as "The Daily Worse Than Failure".[14]

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".[15] 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[16] and received over 350 submissions[17] which were then judged by popular technology bloggers Raymond Chen, Jeremy Zawodny and Joel Spolsky.[18]

The winning entry was Stephen Oberholtzer's "Buggy 4-Function Calculator",[19][20] 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 a 15-inch MacBook Pro.

Notable guest appearances

In addition to the mostly anonymous stories, several prominent figures have written stories they’ve encountered in their professional experience:

See also

References
  1. Alex Papadimoulis, The Daily WTF
  2. ACM Queue vol. 3, no. 6 - July/August 2005
  3. “Cool Developer Tricks: Coding Catastrophes”, Redmond Developer News, April 15, 2007
  4. Web Development Resources Websites - 2006
  5. Soft Coding
  6. The Inner-Platform Effect
  7. "Ihblria". 2004-10-11.
  8. Announcement: WTF in Français (Alex Papadimoulis, The Daily WTF, 2008-03-26)
  9. Your Daily Cup of WTF (Alex Papadimoulis' .NET Blog, 17 May 2004)
  10. Comment on Papadimoulis’s Blog suggesting to start a new site
  11. Announcement: Website.RenameTo(“Worse Than Failure”)
  12. Comment On Announcement: Website.RenameTo(“Worse Than Failure”)
  13. "Announcement: A New, New, New Name!". 2007-12-12. Retrieved 2007-12-12.
  14. Announcement: 2007 Survey Results & Site Changes - The Daily WTF
  15. The OMGWTF Programming Contest
  16. OMGWTF FAQ
  17. “Going Through the Entries...”
  18. OMGWTF Judges
  19. Entry #100043: Buggy 4-Function Calculator - OMGWTF Programming Contest
  20. Olympiad of Misguided Geeks Announces Winners of 'Worst Software' Creative Coding Contest
  21. Blake Ross on Popup Suppression
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