Alex Papadimoulis

Last year's Code PaLOUsa (held in downtown Louisville) was a blast, and it was great to meet up with some of you guys who were able make it out. I'm definitely excited about Code PaLOUsa 2012; there's a lot of great speakers, and it's right in the heart of bourbon country. My Talk — Ugly Code: Beauty is in The Eye of the Beholder

"Mac OS X has an odd definition of gigabyte," writes Kevin Kelly.

Imagine yourself as an eager, young developer. After many long months of self-study, you’ve carefully honed your craft and have skillfully mastered virtually all development technologies from enterprisey to hipster. Your twelve-page résumé could land you a job anywhere, and as it would happen, the job you decided to take was at a highfalutin consultancy filled with like-minded developers who were almost as skilled as you.

The Storage Warehouse (from Grig) The first recession I remember was in the early 1990’s, and I remember it so well because I was looking for a job. The want ads listed an opening for a UNIX admin – something which was right up my alley – so I gave the company a ring.

"I work on a team maintaining a large and enterprisey PHP system," writes Amber, "and as such, my job mostly involves doing enhancements and fixing bugs."

We've got some great companies that sponsor The Daily WTF. And all they ask in return... just take a moment or two to check out what they do. It's some pretty cool stuff. TDWTF Sponsors   SingleHop Cloud Instances 98% off - Design, deploy and manage your cloud instance on the public cloud for only $1 for your 1st month (normally $50/month!) Use your Cloud Instnace to test new code, experiment with new software or gain extra development time...it's your choice! Try it today with coupon code "CLOUD1".   New Relic is basically a magical, real-time performance and user monitoring tool that works on virtually any web platform: Java, Ruby, PHP, .net, Python, Ruby on Rails. I'm not sure how it works (magic?), but it's incredibly easy to use and is pretty inexpensive. Remember: performance is a must-have feature!   Monetate - their testing, targeting and personalization platform for online retailers is used on leading websites like Best Buy, Sports Authority and Urban Outfitters. If you’re a problem-solver who is passionate about rich web applications, scaling Internet applications to billions of page views, and working with big data, then you’re a perfect fit for our close-knit and agile team.!   Inedo - the makers of BuildMaster, the free, and easy-to-use, web-based deployment and release management tool. Going far beyond Continuous Integration, BuildMaster delivers a series of robust features unparalleled by other build-promote-deploy-distribute tools. Oh, did I mention it's free?   Amazon DynamoDB - is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can launch a new Amazon DynamoDB database table, scale up or down request capacity for the table without downtime or performance degradation, and gain visibility into resource utilization and performance metrics.

"When digging through some code that was on the refactor list, I came accross some validation logic that checks if the user selected enough options on the form," writes Chris Osgood, "if enough options weren't selected, you'd get an error message along that said something like 'at least 3 options are required'."

It’s January 18, 2012 and, while most of the internet has decided to blackout their sites in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), we’re taking an opposite stance and are whiting-out The Daily WTF in support of SOPA supporters.

“She’s convinced that terrorists have compromised her computer,” Tom Davidson’s colleague – a front-line helpdesk technician – reported, “best I can tell, it’s some sort of virus problem, or something. It’s is a bit out of my league, but I’m hoping you can help.”

"I found a schizophrenic comment that either intentionally or unintentionally happens to be a haiku," wrote Ben Vanik, "svn blame says this single line is the work of 3 different people across 3 years of coding."

I'm at CodeMash today (stop by the Inedo booth if you're there!), so I thought it'd be a great time for this classic. Rutherford, Price, Atkinson, Strickland, and Associates Dentistry, Inc was originally published on January 30th, 2008.

"One day, our logistics analysis vendor interface completely broke down," wrote Ben Davis, "that's a Bad ThingTM, as our primary focus is to provide logistical services to our clients."

"I'm not sure how he did it," writes Joey, "but one of my colleagues convinced management that we needed a trouble ticketing system. Since we had been using email and post-it notes for many years, it was a welcome addition to the team. Well, at least it would have been... had it not been a home-grown system written by Chad."

Cob spotted this in his local weekly flier.

"There's been a lot of talk that 2012 will exclude the month of December," writes Jon-Paul Murrow, "you know, end of world, Mayan calendar, Nostradamus, and all that. Even if this doesn't happen, there's no guarantee that future years will have twelve months."

"I'm just a software guy, so I don't know much about wiring and whatnot," writes Chip, "but I'm pretty sure this isn't a good way to build out a server closet."

"Most people spend their New Year's Eve watching the ball drop and celebrating the New Year," writes Jason, "and actually, that's what I planned to do, too. Instead, I found myself debugging our licensing activation system." "Just as I was about to leave the office, I received a torrent of emails with the subject 'License Activation Failed'. One or two every now and then is expected, but dozens and dozens at four o'clock on New Year's Eve... not so good. It took me a moment to realize the significance of 4:00PM, but then it hit me: I'm on Pacific Time, which is UTC -8 hours.