Alex Papadimoulis

"Working in IT, I see lots of error messages," writes Eric, "this one, however, was unique. Apparently the computer didn't nobulate quite right..."

"This code was left by the Senior Software Consultant," Michael Wheeler writes, "I'm not sure if it's insurance against 'Return' not returning... or a comment that explained why the line of code was left in."

“It’s impossible,” Gerald said in a matter-of-fact tone, “simply impossible.”

“I was hired as a ‘best practices consultant’ to help bring a 300-developer company’s development practices into the 21st century,” wrote Ian, “and after six months, I had failed.”

"I've heard about verified by Visa, but this is something new," writes Velmu.

It's time once again for Share Your Bizarre Email day! mail in or post your favorite emails in the comments. Here's three to get started...

“Our codebase is a bit... backwards, to say the least,” writes Aaron Silver, “things that should go up don’t go up or down... instead, they’re painted orange .”

Not too long ago, I was at a client site, working to understand and improve their development process. From a birds-eye view, their development organization was a lot like many other Corporate IT set-ups: they had a sizable portfolio of proprietary applications that were built for and used by different business groups. Some of these applications were “mission critical” and had highly formalized promotion and deployment processes, while others were ancillary and were hardly ever used. <shameless_plug>This, along with the medley of technologies and platforms, was why they sought our help in managing and automating their development processes with BuildMaster.</shameless_plug>

“When a ‘customer’ of ours needs custom-developed software to suit their business requirements,” Kelly Adams writes, “they can either ‘buy’ the development services from the IT department, or go to an outside vendor. In the latter case, then we’re supposed to approve that the software meets corporate security guidelines.”