Jake Vinson

Excitement was in the air. It was the turn of the century and the dot-com boom was in full effect. The bubble just kept growing and growing, and it was probably invincible! The consulting company that Chris G. worked for had gotten their largest contract yet — the first they'd ever had in the seven figure range. Their goal? Build a sister site for a major investment bank that would serve news and analysis on the latest in the investment world.

Jared D.'s time at the hardware store's paint department was mostly uneventful. At 16 years old, he worked over the summer to make some extra money before starting his sophomore year of high school. Day in, day out he'd guide customers to rollers, brushes, primers, tapes, and sponges. It wasn't as boring, though, when he got to use the paint machine.

Sometimes you see some code and can feel the frustration of the original developer. Sometimes it's because of profanity-laden comments in the code, other times it's because you can tell that they were right on the brink of a major breakthrough, but gave up.

"This strange tooltip popped up while playing with some code in Dev-C++," J. K. writes. "It seems to be saying something important but unfortunately doesn't make any sense."

Submitted anonymously: "I found this in a data access layer for an application testing framework. The object has fields that are obviously meant to contain integers, doubles, and DateTime objects, but they are all strings and this is the only constructor:

Stefan K., how much freaking memory do you have in your computer‽

Originally posted by "jjeff1" ...

James H. writes "If you had to programatically output a list of HTML <a> tags linking to anchors for the Alphabet like this:

What's the sound of one hand clapping? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Can Word edit the unknown?

Life was good for Jeremy. He'd just landed a good job with interesting coworkers in a nice, newly-remodeled office. His cubicle was at the perfect distance between the elevators, bathroom, and snack machines. His boss respected him, his coworkers wouldn't hesitate to help him, and it was work that he genuinely enjoyed.

Eric would've waited for a better testimonial before putting it online...

In Leon's country, most government institutions are legally obligated to disclose certain data on the internet — their structure, responsibility, public competitions, general announcements, and so on. Leon worked for a company that did government work exclusively, and during a lull in their normal projects, they noticed an unfilled niche — software designed specifically to make sharing of this information easy.

Although Brice hadn't been on the job for very long, he'd gotten pretty comfortable with leading technical interviews. He'd quickly compiled a stock set of questions that could weed out the hacks. Questions that immediately disqualify you for the position if you get them wrong: What is your first name? Name a .NET language. Questions that almost certainly disqualify you if you get them wrong: What datatype would you use to store a string of characters? Is it C sharp or C pound?

'Maximum Number of Emails Per Hour Has Been Exceeded?' What the hell? The head of Golficionados was not pleased. He called James to get it fixed.