WTF (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Most programmers are familiar with this iconic comic:

Source

And anyone who has ever done code review or even just tried to read code knows how true this is.

WTF. Why?

Well, I've been doing more code reviews lately, and I found myself wishing I had an easy way to record those moments that just make me go: "WTF".

Seriously, though, it's useful to keep a log of your thoughts while doing code review for later summary. I thought it might be even better to timestamp those thoughts. That way, I could quantify exactly how much of my life had been wasted on crappy code. Inspired by the comic above, I also wanted to generate a WTF/min score as a useful (stretching that word) code review benchmark.

It's also just plain cathartic to pound out a WTF or two if ever you find yourself looking at very. bad. code.

Use

WTF is a single, dependency-free Python file. I recommend Python 3.3 and above.

To record a WTF moment, just execute it:

./wtf.py

By default this will write a timestamp to a file in the local directory called 'wtfs.txt'.

Want to add some detail about the sheer idiocy that's blowing your mind right now? Just use the --message argument (-m for short). Make sure your message is in quotes (just like git commit -m):

./wtf.py -m "Why the hell would someone indent with tabs in this module, when all of the other modules use spaces!? ARG1!@!fk.dfaskdnfasvnowe"

You can change the location of the output file with the --output/-o option:

./wtf.py -m "I just can't even." -o code-review-01.txt

And finally, you can get summary stats with the --read/-r options. Just supply the name of the file to read:

./wtf.py -r code-review-01.txt

And you'll get an output like this:

Total WTFs: 35
Duration (minutes): 20.54
WTFs/min: 1.704

Run ./wtf.py -h to see the complete usage info:

usage: wtf.py [-h] [-m MESSAGE] [-o OUTFILE] [-r READ]

Easily record WTF moments.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -m MESSAGE, --message MESSAGE
                        Record the thing that made you go WTF
  -o OUTFILE, --outfile OUTFILE
                        Specify a filename for your WTF log.
  -r READ, --read READ  Read a WTF log file. Outputs stats and WTFs per
                        minute.