The Daily WTF is a humorous yet insightful blog that highlights absurd, puzzling, and downright bizarre coding practices, software design decisions, and IT anecdotes encountered in the wild. Through anonymous submissions and reader-contributed stories, The Daily WTF exposes the pitfalls of poor software engineering, questionable coding practices, and humorous tales from the trenches of IT. Developers can learn  lessons from the mistakes and misadventures shared on The Daily WTF, reminding them of the importance of code quality, best practices, and maintaining sanity in the world of software development.

The Daily WTF

A developer manually changed the code to disable a branch, leaving behind a mysterious and awkward condition.

A Poorly Pruned Branch

<p>We definitely don’t allow that in the current product’s codebase, but we do have a habit of commenting-out (and usually commenting why) code is no longer valid in the legacy codebase. That said, the legacy code is a bit of a shit-show anyway, and will be “dead” in the nearish future, so… Yeah.</p>
<p>What I think is funny are the comments about having a negation in an <code>if</code> statement. I just did a search-all for <code>if \(!</code> in the current codebase and got “104+ matches in 38+ files.” And I know probably a good half of them are mine! 🤣 And yes, many are “if this thing doesn’t exist, return.” And being Groovy, <code>!thing</code> is our way of doing a <code>null</code> check… And yes, we use <code>null</code> because it’s clearer for us in our domain; and because the Null Object pattern wasn’t instilled from the get-go.</p>
