Articles

Bogotesting - Submitted by Theo I was helping a teammate debug an issue today, and I found myself at a loss when perusing the entry for the bug in our issue tracker. I present to you, Bogotesting:

Change. It's something we all live with every day. We change our clothes, jobs and sometimes even spouses. Change can be a good thing. Some say not to fear change, but to embrace it! Wisdom tells us to always be prepared for change. Bill U's company likes to be prepared for change.

Egon was fortunate enough to land a front-line support job fresh out of college, but he didn’t enjoy a single minute of it. He continued to slog thru the seven circles of Helldesk for about a year until he found an opportunity to move on. An opening at nearby WTF University’s Electronic Engineering department needed to be filled by a well-rounded IT guy. Egon didn’t think he had much of a chance to land the job, but desperation made him try.

When Ben found this block of code, he had some questions: who wrote it, and what was it supposed to do?

"I work for an IT department in a large department store and while scanning through some old code, I ran upon this gem," writes Steve C., "I can't say that I disagree!"

Kristian stood on the deck of the USS Marianas, the sun in his face. The Marianas and her sister ship, the USS Abyssal Explorer, were a two-boat exploration team, scouring the Atlantic for oil deposits not yet tapped by offshore rigs. The sea rolled beneath him, far calmer than it had been the day before. It was a perfect day off the coast of Brazil in the south Atlantic.

Adam worked for a company that sold check printing machines. It was not a particularly large company, but the machines were cutting edge when it came to the latest and greatest technologies to prevent check fraud. So while the company was doing well enough, until now the company was selling equipment solely in the United States. At least, that is, until one of the more enterprising sales people decided to ‘branch out’.

It was with a great deal of enthusiasm that Pat, fresh out of college, joined Multinational Bank. Their technology division was the pride of the financial industry, and the on-boarding session Pat received did not disappoint: he was treated to a full day of slideshows on compliance, whistle-blowing, and, most importantly, ethics.

BlobConfig.config not found, said the error console of The Blob-- the "insane in every way" system Sep's company produced.

"Someone FINALLY got it right!!" Farz wrote, "In my native language, we don't have translations for seven months out of the year. Way to go Windows Live!!"

The company that Karl J. works for recently signed a contract with a big North American corporation and everybody’s really excited at the prospect. Practically overnight, their flagship product - a platform-as-a-service solution – would gain a boost of about 40,000 users and an accompanying in-stream of cash too.

"That's quite an impressive resume, Fred," Avi said. The phone interview had gone well so far; among the several hundred applicants for Senior Developer at BigBoxCo, Fred's qualifications put him among the top five Avi had spoken to. Fred himself was amiable, if slightly over-confident.

I'll be heading to England next week to talk about DevOps and Cloud Stuffs. May 16 (Thu) @ Coventry User Group (What is DevOps Anyway?) May 21 (Tue) @ Cambridge User Group (What is DevOps Anyway?) May 22 (Wed) @ London (Practical DevOps & Continuous Delivery: A Hands-on Workshop) May 22 (Wed PM) @ Software East (Implementing DevOps… and Making it Actually Stick) May 23 (Thus) @ DevOps Summit London (Implementing DevOps… and Making it Actually Stick) May 24 (Fri) @ Cloud East (Racing Thru the Last Mile: Cloud Delivery & Web-Scale Deployment) London Get-together!

Ben sent in the following snippet from a PHP site. His description of the site as a whole is unpublishable in most countries, but among his frankly shocking profanity he pointed out a lack of error checking and comments, and an abundance of unreadable inline code and confusing, unnecessary functions.

I'm not looking for a new job, but a head-hunter called (from a five year old resume) with a position that sounded pin point perfect. Since there is nothing going on at work, I thought I'd check it out.

"I just wanted to know what a certain pending charge meant on my credit card, unfortunately the help text popup didn't know either," writes Alex N.

“It’s a small, dynamic company.” “We’re growing, and growing fast!” “Our agile team needs some strong management, and we think you’re right for the job.” “Your paycheck is going to be so large Ed McMahon will deliver it.”

Michael listened as his co-worker Draughon droned on at lunch. "I just don't trust hashes, man. I never understood any of the algorithms behind them, and I don't trust anything I don't understand."