---
title: "Back to the Lab"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/back-to-the-lab-8eydpqgzg
source_url: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/back-to-the-lab
type: article
source: "The Daily WTF"
published: 2026-08-19T11:41:50.548Z
updated: 2026-08-19T11:42:09.172Z
tags: ["math", "data-processing"]
reading_time: 4
upvotes: 0
comments: 0
language: en
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Back to the Lab

**[The Daily WTF](https://daily.dev/sources/thedailywtf)** · 4 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A team using Matlab to manage experimental scenarios needed a simple way to generate and store participant-specific images, but constraints around their database and Matlab license left no clean solution. A developer named Jude wrote a state-machine-style trigger-parsing script full of convoluted case logic and self-deprecating comments to reconstruct experiment patterns from log data. The code relies on counting stimuli rather than directly referencing responses, uses a for-loop with a switch statement (the classic 'for-case' antipattern), and includes comments admitting uncertainty about correctness. It later turned out 20% of the provided logs belonged to entirely different, unrelated experiments.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://thedailywtf.com/articles/back-to-the-lab>

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---

Tags: [#math](https://daily.dev/tags/math), [#data-processing](https://daily.dev/tags/data-processing)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/back-to-the-lab-8eydpqgzg)