Alex Papadimoulis

Brian works for a web development shop with an all-too-common formula: lots of intern labor and a very high turnover. As a recent hire, a large part of Brian's job is maintaining old sites developed by various former employees.

When Andy G opened up libsymblogy.h (sic), he was relieved. Finally, some documentation! Of course, upon further inspection, Andy realized that the comments didn’t quite explain how the code works, how it interfaces with other modules, or even why it uses certain magic numbers like -13. Instead, every function had a comment just as hyperverbose and vapid as this…

Not too long ago, The Powers That Be in the emerging eastern-European country of Latveria (as I’ll call it) decided that the time had come for a massive, central monitoring system that would be used to ensure the country’s security. SENTINEL, as the system would be called, involved data exchange between virtually every governmental agency, airports, financial institutions, transit systems, and so forth, all for the purpose of being able to track people and the money they spend. After well over a year of negotiations, The Powers That Be selected Christian B’s company to design SENTINEL’s enterprise architecture.

Finding bad code in some old system you’ve come to maintain is one thing. Being tasked with adding bad code to a new system is a whole other type of pain. Paul G was lucky enough to experience this first hand.

Edward F wishes that some products weren't quite that honest to him...

The Beat on the Street in Peterborough (England) is that Data Interchange is looking to hire Software Developers. And I mean “on the street” quite literally:

“Ummm…” the top email in Alex M.’s inbox started, “why did you delete my message about the approval bug? And then delete the message inquiring about the deletion? This issue isn’t going away – please investigate this right away!”

The idea behind “information hiding” – i.e. encapsulating certain methods and properties to users of a class – is a fair idea in theory, but in practice, it’s just too slow. Think about it. If a “public” method just ends up calling some “private” method, that’s just a waste of a call. And if a lot of calls are made to that public method, then that’s a whole lot of wasted calls!

Eric actually read the EULA for Office 2007 Compatibility Pack, and was happy to know that Microsoft will actually take responsibility up to five whole dollars for damages to your computer...

After Travis took his new position he was amazed to find that the developers that he was replacing were completely unaware of the Date/Time library in the .NET Framework. Instead the relied upon time spans and complicated regular expressions for simple tasks, such as validating a string as a date...

The transition from computer technician to software developer can be pretty rough. Not only does one have to give up the chic company car (and, of course, all the hot dates it guarantees), but he has to land that rare technician job that has just enough programming work to stretch his job title on a résumé to “programmer.” Garret was lucky enough to find that job at a small computer repair shop we’ll called “AAAA Computers”

Developers-turned-dev managers often struggle to contain themselves when it comes to bug hunting. After all, they can usually resolve problems faster and better than the coders in their employ. The problem is, no developer wants a boss who takes more time explaining what must be done than it actually takes to do it. That leaves dev managers in the difficult spot of delegating the bug hunt and waiting for results.

At first I was thrilled about the unexpected rate decrease, but leave it to AT&T to crush my excitement ...