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We're back again with a little something different, brought to you by Raygun. Once again, the cast of "Improv for Programmers" is going to create some comedy on the fly for you, and this time… you could say it's… transformative. Today's episode contains small quantities of profanity.
Raygun provides a window into how users are really experiencing your software applications.
Every now and then, you come across a special project. You know the sort, where some business user decides that they know exactly what they need and exactly how it should be built. They get the buy-in of some C-level shmoe by making sure that their lips have intimate knowledge of said C-level butt. Once they have funding, they have people hired and begin to bark orders.
About 8 years ago, I had the privilege experience of being on such a project. When we were given the phase-I specs, all the senior tech people immediately said that there was no way to perform a sane daily backup and data-roll for the next day. The response was "We're not going to worry about backups and daily book-rolls until later". We all just cringed, made like good little HPCs and followed our orders to march onward.
A few years back, JSON crossed the “really good hammer” threshold. It has a good balance of being human readable, relatively compact, and simple to parse. It thus has become the go-to format for everything. “KoHHeKT” inherited a service which generates some JSON from an in-memory tree structure. This is exactly the kind of situation where JSON shines, and it would be trivial to employ one of the many JSON serialization libraries available for C# to generate JSON on demand.
Orrrrr… you could use LINQ aggregations, string formatting and trims…
After working mind-numbing warehouse jobs for several years, Jesse was ready for a fresh start in Information Technology. The year 2015 brought him a newly-minted Computer and Networking Systems degree from Totally Legit Technical Institute. It would surely help him find gainful employment, all he had to do was find the right opportunity.
Seeking the right opportunity soon turned in to any opportunity. Jesse came across a posting for an IT Systems Administrator that piqued his interest but the requirements and responsibilities left a lot to be desired. They sought someone with C++ and Microsoft Office experience who would perform "General IT Admin Work" and "Other Duties as assigned". None of those things seemed to fit together, but he applied anyway.
David G. wrote, "For once, I'm glad to see technical issues being presented in a technical way."
We always like to change things up a little bit here at TDWTF, and thanks to our sponsor Raygun, we've got a chance to bring you a little treat, or at least something a little different.
We're back with a new podcast, but this one isn't a talk show or storytelling format, or even a radio play. Remy rounded up some of the best comedians in Pittsburgh who were also in IT, and bundled them up to do some improv, using articles from our site and real-world IT news as inspiration. It's… it's gonna get weird.
Sometimes, you learn something new, and you suddenly start seeing it show up anywhere. The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is the name for that. Sometimes, you see one kind of bad code, and the same kind of bad code starts showing up everywhere. Yesterday we saw a nasty attempt to use bitmasks in a loop.
Today, we have Michele’s contribution, of a strange way of interacting with bitmasks. The culprit behind this code was a previous PLC programmer, even if this code wasn’t running straight on the PLC.
The “for-case” or “loop-switch” anti-pattern creates some hard to maintain code. You know the drill: the first time through the loop, do one step, the next time through the loop, do a different step. It’s known as the “Anti-Duff’s Device”, which is a good contrast: Duff’s Device is a clever way to unroll a loop and turn it into a sequential process, while the “loop-switch” takes a sequential process and turns it into a loop.
Ashlea inherited an MFC application. It was worked on by a number of developers in Germany, some of which used English to name identifiers, some which used German, creating a new language called “Deunglish”. Or “Engleutch”? Whatever you call it, Ashlea has helpfully translated all the identifiers into English for us.
