At Initrode, their main business is large-scale data warehousing. Their products are used by the biggest companies in the world, and to keep up with demand, naturally, they have hundreds of rock star developers churning out incredible solutions.
They also have Commander Joe.
When Alex was a fresh young admin, he was assigned to provide network support for a team of master developers. These guys had years of experience and knew what they were doing, so when they asked for something to be set up, you could bank on their request being correct.
Alex recieved a request from one of the master developers to set up a VM for him and his team. Since it was a development machine, the developers were given root access.
"I'm not quite sure what to think of the software developer who apparently thought that the perfect way to say you wanted to continue was to choose 'cancel'," Dirk wrote, "Maybe another button just wasn't in the budget"
Learning to handle exceptions properly, knowing when to catch, and when to throw them, is an art. Knowing when it’s a case to retry or to abort a process requires a deep understanding of the problem you’re going to solve.
This code, which Adam found, is a pretty bad example of what to do:
Sales, as everyone knows, is the mortal enemy of Development.
Their goals are opposite, their people are opposite, their tactics are opposite. Even their credos - developers "Make a good product" but sales will "Do anything to get that money" - are at complete odds.
Highly Paid Consultants™ should be knowledgeable in their claimed area of expertise. One would assume that any consultant would have a basic understanding of what passing parameters to a function is for and how to utilize that concept in their chosen programming language.
One would be wrong.
The ICSP compliance application was a dull piece of software. Instead of managing Active Directory with one of the many off-the-shelf packages, this was built in-house, and helped the sysadmins manage user accounts, permissions and access. Despite the fact that this application had no right to exist, it did, and it was tied into so many IT business processes that ICSP was marked a “critical” application.
Kelly spent too much time with her hands deep in the entrails of this ugly creature. Since she “owned” it, she was the recipient of a panicked email: “ICSP is down! What did you do?” She had changed a few things is code, recently, but nothing had been released to test, let alone production. Quickly, she skimmed the email chain.
Stephanie F. writes, "Not sure what this survey will be about, but I look forward to taking it!"
In case you're not familiar with the concept of a load balancer, the purpose of having one is to spread requests across multiple, identical servers associated with it so as to give the requester the best possible experience. As an added bonus, you can take a box out of load, patch/fix/update it, and throw it back into the fray as the other servers, if you're doing things correctly, can temporarily handle the additional load.
Bottom line - load balancers are cool ...but it can be complicated and/or expensive to implement what is often a hardware based solution. So what can you do? Well, for starters, you could code your own.
Alex, web developer for Chronos Industries, thought she might be going crazy when the company's VPN server kept disappearing. Alex's VPN software would connect to the server without issue, but every half hour or so it would disconnect. It made FTP-ing any large files an exercise in frustration.
Her friend Karl, a research assistant from the upstairs Temporal Lab, was trying to tell her in layman's terms about one of his projects when it happened again. Until now she hadn't had any witnesses to confirm it when the IT department investigated.
