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We've all heard of dates. Not the kind with someone to whom you're attracted. No, I mean the kind that represent some relative position on the calendar. Now we've all seen what people do when faced with the extremely difficult task of working with dates. Short of programming in brainfsck, intelligent programmers use the built-in variety, be it in C#, Java, etc.

Lisa thought that the Modesto Biology Institute was the perfect working environment. The scientists who showed her around were all friendly, not the "evil, lab-coated villains" portrayed in Fritz Lang films. The lab director, Howard, pointed out the lack of horror monsters in their lab after Lisa joked about it during her interview.

Bakdar was the only technical person at PromoCorp, a marketing company. When someone finally launched a technical project, he was ready. The product was a cutting-edge web-to-print technology, in which Joe User could easily upload an image of his plumbing company’s logo onto a mock-up of a pen, and send it to PromoCorp with his order. It would save time, money, and provide a revenue stream for PromoCorp. The project was big, the project was technical, and the project was the attractive sort of thing that made careers. Bakdar was over the moon.

Bob worked at a small company. There’s a messy history in its founding. The owner, Aaron, worked for another company making basically the same software, until he finally got fed up with their coding style and practices. So he quit to found his own company, with his own rules about things, like how many blank lines there should be before a for loop (exactly 1), how to order variable declarations (alphabetically, with “::” coming after “z”), and how source control should be organized (about as organized as organized crime).

"Apparently this truck has a few more features than standard trucks," writes Derek, "I'm sure the price would have been an even $3,000,000 but there are a few miles on it to drive it down."

Way back when Java first came out, if you wanted to split a string into tokens, you had to roll your own mechanism to do so. Of course, even as far back as Java 1.2, there were some built-in secrets to help you tokenize your string so you could iterate over the tokens.

Security is challenging to get right. It's always a complex balancing act between what users want and what administrators need. Between placing the server in a hermetically sealed container with no cables running the outside world, and setting the server up on the busiest street corner in town with an already logged-in administrator account pulled up on the attached monitor. Depending on the O/S update policy in practice at your company, that last example can be roughly the equivalent of connecting your server to the Internet.

Fred S. never much cared for zebra striping, the UI pattern than was all the rage after Mac OS X launched in 2001. It found its way into other Mac applications, web pages, even onto Linux. Like a tsunami of alternating grey-and-white waves, it overtook everything in its path.

As an IT infrastructure manager, Jerry spent more time skimming his junkmail folder than he liked. Unfortunately, a large number of important messages landed there, because Garrett, the CSO, mandated an extremely aggressive approach to identifying spam. No less than once a week, a vital message was marked as spam.

"I was looking at prices for a train journey," writes Hamish, "I think my company's accountant might raise an eyebrow if I upgraded to first class".

"Chinese buffet2". Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Assembler. C. C++. C#. PHP. Javascript. Bash. Perl. Ruby. Java. These were just some of the technologies featured on the resume of a candidate Christian recently interviewed for a senior Linux sysadmin position. The impressive list of programming languages (and related data-interchange acronyms like XSLT and JSON) made the candidate, let's call him Rob, seem more qualified for a developer position, but he went on to list common web server databases like MySQL and Postgres (plus a couple flavours of NoSQL), and, finally, the qualifications Christian was actually interested in: Tomcat, JBOSS, the Hotspot JVM, and every major Linux distro. While the resume reeked of keyword-baiting, Christian didn't want to risk missing out on an excellent sysadmin who just happened to spend a lot of time hacking, and brought Rob in.

Peter came across this helpful little utility function:

DBAs are supposed to bring knowledge of the underpinnings of databases to the table. How to lay out tables and indices across disks for linear vs. striped access. How to properly set up partitioning for different types of access. Granting assorted privileges and roles. Managing backup and aging off data in a controlled manner, and so forth.

A little while back, I posted a user survey and asked for some general comments -- thanks to everyone who replied and shared their thoughts. I was hoping to share the survey results sooner, but I got a bit caught up in that Release! Kickstarter project.

Correct now, optimize later. is one of the most important developer mantras and Scott K. followed it to a fault. He was on a team of programmers debugging a C# package management application, which used Microsoft SQL for revision tracking. Make sure it works right the first time; you can always tease out more performance after launch.

"When War Thunder crashed, apparently there were some squirrels hiding in there and they gnawed on something. I don't know which button I'm supposed to push!" Jay wrote.

Mark was upset. You didn't have to sit next to him to know it, either. Even though his cubicle was at the far end of the farm, his frequent tirades were always audible to the rest of the office. Mark wasn't the most skilled or the most careful developer on the team, but what he lacked in ability he made up for in volume: a lot of his poorer decisions stood simply because his colleagues wanted to avoid a barrage.

A large company is something like a whale. They are huge beasts who strain their sustenance (profits) from the ocean that surrounds them. In this analogy, customers are krill, but their employees are more like Jonah- wrapped up inside of a beast larger and more complex than they can possibly imagine.

Personally, in all my years of application development, I have had zero use of ternary operators.

A client of Jim's with a WordPress site had been having performance issues that were off the scale bad. Slower then a snail on Valium. Slower than a herd of turtles rampaging through a molasses factory. Worse than that, the actual in-browser rendering was taking significantly longer than any benchmarking tests would lead you to believe. Even massively loaded benchmark tests had a better rendering time. And the client's browser's weren't massively loaded.

It's the 4th of July, which is the day the US attempts to forget they ever pretended to like soccer through wild displays of patriotism and fireworks. It's also a holiday, so enjoy this WTF from the archives, The Program Generator Program from 2012.

A long, long time ago, in a phone company long since gone and resurrected, if Aunt Bee wanted to call Sheriff Andy, she picked up the phone, pressed the receiver a couple of times, the operator picked up, Bee said to connect her to Andy, and the operator shoved a jack into a hole to complete the circuit. For long distance calls, two or more operators and switchboards were involved. It left something to be desired, but it worked.

Faibbus works with an international team. Some of his fellow developers don’t quite adhere to the same standards. This code was in a module, and the comments and text were originally in Dutch.

In the late 90s, Jeremy fought a battle against a menace more terrifying than the dreaded Y2K bug. He maintained a network management application running on Solaris which managed TDM and ATM switches, called PortLog. This prototype CMDB maintained a database of all of the equipment in the network. It created a unique identifier encoded each device’s shelf, slot and port number according to a “magic” formula. That formula needed to change in the next release, thus forcing the unique ID of each device to change as well, in every deployed instance of their database.