A Pirate's Confession

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Today we have a true confession from Carl W. It has the benefit of being in R, which means that at a glance, I just assume "eh, looks fine to me." I guess I'm turning into Jimbo.

But let's dig into it. Carl's first snippet is this:


The Modern Job Hunt: A Side Quest

by in Feature Articles on

Over the past few months, Ellis has been sharing the challenges of the modern job hunt. As I'm one week into my new gig, after a weird and protracted search, I thought I'd add my two cents, because kids: it's nasty out there, for sure.

So, for starters, I wrapped up my time working on space robots, and have shifted over to farm robots. That's right, I'm a farmer now. While it may be less glamorous, the business prospects, and thus the prospects of continued employment, are better. That said, I'm working with a startup so I wouldn't say it's all that safe. Still, good change for now, and maybe I'll talk a bit more about what that's like at some point. But that's not where I want to focus today.


Twofers

by in Error'd on

This week's episode is brought to you by the number two.

"Two Error'ds in two months from these guys!" exclaim'd Thad H. Frist was this, about which Thad snarked "Canada got rid of the penny years ago. I guess the 407ETR took that literally."


The Review

by in CodeSOD on

Frequent contributor Argle Bargle (recently, or even in last week's Errord) works with a programmer called "Jimbo". Jimbo is a solid co-worker and a good programmer. He has more tenure at the company than Argle, which means Jimbo is who Argle goes to when he has questions.

Recently, Argle worked his way through a rather complicated bit of code. It involved passing data between two different languages inside of a real-time system. Much of its functionality was opaque and complicated, so Argle wrote literal paragraphs of documentation explaining what the code did, how to invoke it, what the gotchas might be, and how to avoid them.


Un-break-able

by in Feature Articles on

Ever feel like it'd all fall to pieces if you so much as turned your head? In the comments section of our article seeking your seasonal horror stories, Wayne shared a holiday WTF of a different sort that's too good not to share:

Not a holiday problem, but a me being on holiday problem.


No Yes

by in CodeSOD on

It's common to see code in the form of if (false == true). We get a fair bit of it in our inbox, and we generally don't post it often, because, well, it's usually just a sign that someone generated the code. There's a WTF in that, somewhere, but there's not much to say about the code, beyond, "Don't generate code, pass data from backend to frontend instead."

But Nicholas sends us one that shows a little more of interest in it.


New Year, New You?

by in Announcements on

During the holiday season, we got some of your holiday WTFs. For the next few weeks, we'd love to see your New Year's Resolutions. Maybe ones for you- what WTF do you do that you want to stop doing? But mostly, we're looking for the resolutions you want to give other people- the teammate who microwaves salmon for lunch everyday (it's healthy protein bro), the pointy-haired-boss who thinks they can code because ChatGPT generates code, the company that thinks CI is too much of an expense. What in your day or workplace needs to take on a resolution for this year?

Fanciful sketch by journalist Marguerite Marty of a New Year's Eve celebration.


The Utils

by in CodeSOD on

We know 2026 is not a leap year. But how do we know that? We need to call some function to find out.

Steve sends us a bit of representative code; on it's own, it's not so bad, but with the broader context, it's horrifying:


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