The Daily WTF
humorous blog
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!?) 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[s] as [a] repositor[y] of knowledge and discussion forums for inquisitive web designers and developers" and has introduced several anti-patterns, including Softcoding, the Inner-Platform Effect, and IHBLRIA (Invented Here But Let's Reinvent It Anyway).
The site also has an associated "Édition Française", a French-language edition headed up by Jocelyn Demoy, launched in March 2008, as well as a Polish edition.
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".
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This entry incorporates text from “The Daily WTF” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.