The Daily WTF 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 ‘!?'" 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, including Softcoding, the Inner-Platform Effect, and IHBLRIA. 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 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 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 outsomething newon site." Contestants for the OMGWTF contest were encouraged to focus on writing "clever code" as opposed to "ugly code". The goal of the first 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, Jeremy Zawodny and Joel Spolsky. 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... not just bad code, 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.
