Imagine yourself as an eager, young developer. After many long months of self-study, you’ve carefully honed your craft and have skillfully mastered virtually all development technologies from enterprisey to hipster. Your twelve-page résumé could land you a job anywhere, and as it would happen, the job you decided to take was at a highfalutin consultancy filled with like-minded developers who were almost as skilled as you.
You and you cohorts could build anything. Literally, anything: a software cure for cancer; a software cure engine that could dynamically load cure plug-ins at runtime to cure anything; or even a software engine factory that could dynamically create engines that could dynamically load plug-ins that could do anything.
The Storage Warehouse (from Grig)
The first recession I remember was in the early 1990’s, and I remember it so well because I was looking for a job. The want ads listed an opening for a UNIX admin – something which was right up my alley – so I gave the company a ring.
“Ye-LLO!” was the greeting after a couple of rings. In the background, it sounded like John Philip Sousa March music was playing on a 1960s AM transistor radio.
"I work on a team maintaining a large and enterprisey PHP system," writes Amber, "and as such, my job mostly involves doing enhancements and fixing bugs."
"It sounds normal enough, if not for the fact that almost all variables are globals and each of them might or might not be initialized in the same way, or the same place, as seen in this screenshot."
We've got some great companies that sponsor The Daily WTF. And all they ask in return... just take a moment or two to check out what they do. It's some pretty cool stuff.
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And now for our regularly scheduled program...
"When digging through some code that was on the refactor list, I came accross some validation logic that checks if the user selected enough options on the form," writes Chris Osgood, "if enough options weren't selected, you'd get an error message along that said something like 'at least 3 options are required'."
"It took a little bit of coding to get that validate message. The '3' was obviously dynamic, and if there was only one missing selection, then 'are' was replaced with 'is'. As for the word 'option'...it was is PLURALIZED!"
It’s January 18, 2012 and, while most of the internet has decided to blackout their sites in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), we’re taking an opposite stance and are whiting-out The Daily WTF in support of SOPA supporters.
If there’s one thing that SOPA proponents like myself and SOPA opponents can agree on, it’s that PROTECT-IP and the Stop Online Piracy Act have little to do with protecting intellectual property and stopping online piracy.
“She’s convinced that terrorists have compromised her computer,” Tom Davidson’s colleague – a front-line helpdesk technician – reported, “best I can tell, it’s some sort of virus problem, or something. It’s is a bit out of my league, but I’m hoping you can help.”
As a junior sysadmin for a mid-sized university, Tom found himself playing second-tier helpdesk support more often than not. He didn’t mind – it was certainly better than first-tier, after all – and he appreciated solving the unique problems that were escalated to him. The terrorist virus was definitely one such problem, and it was nothing he had heard of before.
"I found a schizophrenic comment that either intentionally or unintentionally happens to be a haiku," wrote Ben Vanik, "svn blame says this single line is the work of 3 different people across 3 years of coding."
// should delete the temp files here, no cannot because, we havent read it in yet!
I'm at CodeMash today (stop by the Inedo booth if you're there!), so I thought it'd be a great time for this classic. Rutherford, Price, Atkinson, Strickland, and Associates Dentistry, Inc was originally published on January 30th, 2008.
July 19th, 2004 marked a new chapter in New Portlandopolis’s rich dentistry history. It was on that day that the bitter rivalry between Dr. Rutherford, DDS; Dr. Price, DMD, DDS; Dr. Atkinson, DMD; and Dr. Strickland, DDS/DDS-PhD, had finally come to an end. Though there’s much debate on what exactly started the feud, everyone knows what brought the dentists together: the nationwide “denta-corps” that can out-price, out-service, and out-anything their small, family dental practices.
