29 April 2007

The Olympiad of Misguided Geeks, or, One More Reason I'm Going Straight to Hell

Most hilarious programming competition ever, The Olympiad of Misguided Geeks. The whole point is to produce the most interesting "WTF" program.

For those of you just joining us, a "WTF" is a program or information technology system (this includes security policies) that has one of the following qualities:
  • Totally unreadable or otherwise unmaintainable code. This is sometimes called the "job security" programming paradigm.
  • Attrocious over-engineering that implies a novice understanding or unwillingness to use readily available library functions.
  • Lack of documentation or, just as bad, excessive documentation. Also, horrible user interface.
  • Convolution, metasolutions, failed attempts at cleverness.
  • Security by obscurity or use of the Ostrich Algorithm.
I don't know how Thom and I are going to do it, but we, two college-educated professionals, have to create a working program so amateur that we're both going straight to hell for it. I can't give any details here, but so far our program leaks memory like a sieve, overly complicates operations so simple as adding two numbers, and throws a segmentation fault every once in a while just for good measure. Oh yeah and so far it doesn't work. We'll have to fix that.

More updates later, space cadets.

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