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At the university where Diogo worked, the Computer Science program outgrew its status as an unloved child of the Mathematics department. It was to become its own department, and that meant it finally deserved its own building. Since the university in question had a very strong architecture program, the university searched for the biggest names to design the building.

North Korea is a strange place. From what I've read, it's as close to Hell on Earth as any other place, and their sole economic output appears to be YouTube videos featuring their Mass Games. Oh, and don't even get me started on that whole Dear Leader thing.

While many developers sit behind a desk, only seeing the sun on their way to and from the parking lot, Mike felt lucky that he got to travel all around the country performing installations of his company's enterprise software. He enjoyed seeing new places, exploring the local nightlife, and most importantly for a business traveler, expensing everything to a corporate account.

Kevin S. works on websites for a living.

The Command Center Administrator (from Joshua Knarr) A job listing email for a "Command Center Administrator" recently found its way to my inbox. The message was from ACME COMMERCE, which was apparently an UP AND COMING company that would be HUGE AND SUCCESSFUL if they could keep their INTERNET STORE FRONT FOR SPORTING GOODS going. The position was offered to me in fits of caps lock, and it was tough to understand if they were merely excited, or if someone was playing Mad Libs with Job Listing Generator 3.0. I decided they were simply excited to be expanding, so I dutifully sent along my résumé and asked if they had a job description for the Command Center Administrator position.

As we learned in Unit Tested, when you require that developers — especially those "certain" developers — write more unit tests, you'll get exactly what you ask for: more unit tests.

When you work in IT, your family turns to you as the ultimate computer expert. Since Reggie worked in IT for the direct mail industry, not only did he get carpet bombed with the usual computer questions, but also with questions about the piles of junkmail his family received. "Why do they send so many? How do they afford that?" "Is the furniture store really going out of business?" "I got the same thing twice. Do you think I can double up the coupons?"

Tom G. recently joined a team that maintained a fairly large Java client/server application. His first task was fairly simple: prepare for a switch to a different server farm by going through the code to make sure it was portable and wouldn't be affected by a new server, IP address, and so on.

Prisoner of Process was originally published in Alex's DevDisasters column in the August 01, 2007 issue of Redmond Developer News

"Some time ago I was checking the business logic that a friend had done for a system." writes Brian, "While I was debugging, I found this awesome piece of code. I understand that application logic should be bulletproofed to handle any kind of data condition passed to it, nulls, double and single quotes, etc., but I felt this to be an example of over-engineering a solution."

We're still on Summer Break here at The Daily WTF, which means it's time to bring back another classic. But in the mean time, please send in your stories so we'll have plenty to work with when we return next week. Now what's particularly fun about Banking So Advanced is that it was originally published back on October 17, 2007... and is still relevant today. The article links have not changed and the "unique" code remains the same. Consider what that means in Internet Time: back then, Twitter was little more than a silly idea that most everyone found ridiculous. Okay, so clearly, not that much has changed in the past few years, but I should note that this online banking site is still optimized for "Netscape Navigator 4.75 or higher; Internet Explorer 5.0 or 6.0; and AOL 6, 7, or 8."

Working as a DBA in academia, Paul received a notice that a certain newly migrated user schema, specifically the one used by the enrollment tracking system, had swelled to 281 tables and was growing. This had struck Paul as being very strange since the tracking system wasn't all that complicated.

It's the summer break for The Daily WTF! Please send in your own stories so we'll have some fun ones to share when we return. In the mean time, here’s a fun classic. "The Pie T Department" was originally published on August 8, 2007.

Varg's colleague had an awfully difficult problem challenge to solve: remove the language parameter ("lang") from a query string.

It's the summer break for The Daily WTF! We're working on some fun new stories now, but in the mean time, here’s a fun classic. "Anything You Can Do Lyle Can Do Better" was originally published on May 21, 2008.

Reality Support (from Stuart Whelan) Many, many years ago I used to be on-call support for the local hospital and emergency department. The IT system consisted of Wyse serial terminals connected to a Sun system running RealityDB. The software was PMS, the Patient Management System, and I dealt with PMS every day, all day.