---
title: "Never Eating the Cookie"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/never-eating-the-cookie-oapdlxjxm
source_url: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/never-eating-the-cookie
type: article
source: "The Daily WTF"
published: 2026-08-13T11:22:11.012Z
updated: 2026-08-13T11:22:27.978Z
tags: ["php", "curl"]
reading_time: 2
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.

# Never Eating the Cookie

**[The Daily WTF](https://daily.dev/sources/thedailywtf)** · 2 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A freelance developer inherits an old PHP project meant to periodically fetch data from other services via cURL. The previous developer copy-pasted the same block of curl_setopt calls throughout the codebase, apparently confusing CURLOPT_TIMEOUT with a recurrence interval. Worse, the fetched response was stored in a variable and never actually used anywhere, meaning the feature never functioned despite looking like it should.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://thedailywtf.com/articles/never-eating-the-cookie>

---

Tags: [#php](https://daily.dev/tags/php), [#curl](https://daily.dev/tags/curl)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/never-eating-the-cookie-oapdlxjxm)