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"Do you think it's wise to have consultants running our IT department?" Holger asked. It was an honest question, worded as diplomatically as possible. Holger's company had more consultants on hand than actual IT staff.

Think of all those old applications you’ve had to maintain. You know the type: the ones written by long-forgotten developers in long-lost languages. The ones that, after spending days searching for that one line of code that needs to be changed, you frustratingly decree “this f%*#@ thing needs to be rewritten.” And, naturally, the ones that never are, nor never will be rewritten.

Kristján writes, "I agree. No, wait..."

When Greg was shopping for jobs at his college’s career fair, there was a whole lot of business as usual.

"While digging through some inherited code," writes Joe "M2tM" Smith, "I encountered a conditional masquerading as a loop."

The words "Enterprise Integration" strike fear into the most stalwart of developers. When coupled with "in-house developed" and "B2B", one is almost guaranteed to find complex code, arcane requirements, and a thicket of poorly understood file formats. Dan was made of sterner stuff. When the contract was explained to him, he didn't flinch. There were between 40 and 80 partners that used a web app to extract data about multimedia assets? Gigantic recordsets of them? In formats ranging from Excel to iTunes-compatible databases? No problem.

Paul was having a good morning.  It was a beautiful day outside, he managed to shave 15 minutes off his commute, and even the local coffee shop had his favorite donut in stock.  All of that changed when he got his first support call of the day.  It was from a client running "the beast" product.  "The beast", as Paul and his coworkers nicknamed it, was a legacy version of their application developed somewhere overseas years before Paul was hired, by hundreds of poorly trained, and probably poorly paid, developers.  The company's sales team actively encouraged clients to upgrade from the legacy application, but a select few had resisted.

Andrew Carpenter writes, "I guess this is like turn-oning off a switch?"

Bob was in the process of shutting down a software company that he had built over the past seven years. He had found a buyer for all of the software that he'd developed, collected his "eff you money" and was now retiring.

Everyone knows that "Magic Numbers" are bad, Bad, BAD! Take, for example, dividing something into quarters. Because including the literal "4" in your code would be a Magic Number, many developers agree that it's best to define a constant named "FOUR", and then use that constant instead. Makes sense, right?

Everything went dark and a chill wind went up Simon's back. A deep rumble rattled his brain in his skull. He glanced behind him to see Noel looming over him. "Simon, can you ping the Exchange server?"

Role-based security requires, at a minimum, two key elements: users and roles. Roles (such as Administrator, Clerk, and ViewOnlyUser) are defined by the application code and then assigned to users to restrict which functions of the application they may use. It's a pretty simple concept that involves all of two database tables, or one if the user names come from some external source like Active Directory.

"I got this elegant statement of existential philosophy from Microsoft's Process Monitor utility," Matthew wrote, "It died while trying to start up, so yes indeed, for a few shining moments, the application was."

"John, it's about time I showed you how to do a production install," Dave said.

One of the great things about Boolean logic is its simplicity. At the most basic level, there's simply TRUE and FALSE with AND, OR, and NOT. It takes a lot of work to overcomplicate such a simple system, yet "certain" developers seem to find such over-complication second nature. Take E.H.'s colleague, for example.

Bert Glanstron, Greg thought to himself, why does that name sound so familiar? Bert… Glanstron… did I work with him? Did he go to my high school?

James sent in today's snippet with virtually no introduction; just six, measly words: "the grass is definitely not greener." Normally, that'd be a bit frustrating, since it's always nice to know a little history or background about the code. But like those six word stories, James told the classic tale of the young and burgeoning software developer who’s always looking to expand his professional purview by seeking out new opportunities to learn and sharpen his skills, only to find his efforts frustrated by a “seemed good on paper” job that leads to nowhere – or worse – towards destitute and despair.

It's baaaaaack...yep it's THAT time again.  It's Share Your Bizarre Email day!

"Recently, I inherited an ASP.NET web application that hadn't been touched in many a year," wrote Scott Schottler, "I was pleasantly surprised to see that, not only did it successfully convert from a Visual Studio 2003 project, but that it actually built without errors."

Christian’s first day at his new job started out just like many others in the professional IT world.

Remi works on one of his country's largest Internet Service Providers, and has the fortune to be on an elite team that focuses on agile development. Or misfortune, depending on how you look at it: at his company, "agile development" actually means "we need that in two weeks".