The Daily WTF (also called Worse Than Failure from February to December 2007) is a humorous blog dedicated to "Curious Perversions in

Information Technology Information technology (IT) is the use of computers to create, process, store, retrieve, and exchange all kinds of Data (computing), data . and information. IT forms part of information and communications technology (ICT). An information te ...

". 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 as repositor of knowledge and discussion forums for inquisitive web designers and developers" and has introduced several

anti-patterns An anti-pattern in software engineering, project management, and business processes is a common response to a recurring problem that is usually ineffective and risks being highly counterproductive. The term, coined in 1995 by computer programmer An ...

, including Softcoding, the

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. This is generally inefficient and such syste ...

, 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. 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. 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". Papadimoulis 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. OMG WTF) 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 hesite." 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 Raymond T. Chen (born 1968) is a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Biography He joined the intellectual property law firm of Knobbe, Martens, Olson & Bear in Irvine, California. He prose ...

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and

Joel Spolsky Avram Joel Spolsky (born 1965) is a software engineer and writer. He is the author of ''Joel on Software'', a blog on software development, and the creator of the project management software Trello. He was a Program Manager on the Microsoft Exce ...

. 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 ... t'snot just bad code, t'sbelievable 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: *

Blake Ross Blake Aaron Ross (born June 12, 1985) is an American software engineer who is best known for his work as the co-creator of the Mozilla Firefox internet browser with Dave Hyatt. In 2005, he was nominated for ''Wired'' magazine's top Rave Award, Re ...

wrote of the failure of

Netscape 7 Netscape 7 is a discontinued Internet suite developed by Netscape Communications Corporation, and was the seventh major release of the Netscape series of browsers. It is the successor of Netscape 6, and was developed in-house by AOL. It was re ...

References

External links

The Daily WTF
{{DEFAULTSORT:Daily WTF American satirical websites Computing websites Programming contests Computer humor Software bugs Internet properties established in 2004

History

Olympiad of Misguided Geeks

Notable guest appearances

See also

References

External links