The Daily WTF

Jenny had been perfectly happy working on a series of projects for her company, before someone said, “Hey, we need you to build a desktop GUI for an existing API.”

The request wasn’t the problem, per se. The API, on the other hand, absolutely was.

The application Jenny was working on represented a billing contract for materials consumed at a factory. Essentially, the factory built a bunch of individual parts, and then assembled them into a finished product. They only counted the finished product, but needed to itemize the billing down to not only the raw materials that went into the finished product, the intermediate parts, but also the toilet paper put in the bathrooms. All the costs of operating the factory were derived from the units shipped out.

This meant that the contract itself was a fairly complicated tree structure. Jenny’s application was meant to both visualize and allow

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