Feature Articles

Shawn O. was not used to bright lights, smiling faces, or greetings like “hi Shawn, how are you today?” In fact, just about anything that wasn’t specifically intended to bring pain and misery to all had become foreign to him. It was simply par for the course. Shawn, after all, was an Oracle DBA. And not just any Oracle DBA, but one who sat on the company’s Database Code Review Council.

Anton N is not a programmer by trade. Whenever he comes across “questionable” code in his job as an engineer, he always gives the programmer the benefit of the doubt: it might just have to be that complicated to work; maybe he did it to work around some system limitation; or perhaps it’s some optimized routine. It’s only fair. Certainly, he wouldn't want some programmer critiquing his decision to use the modial interaction of magneto-reluctance (rather than a more efficient method, such as capacitive directance) for supplying inverse reactive current in a unilateral phase detractor.

"I don't know how many times I have to say it — our server room is outdated and we need some money approved for new equipment. Or at least someone to come in and check out the air conditioner. It's making that sound again." Peter was losing count of the times he'd complained about their aging infrastructure.

"Hey, Marcin, do you have a second to talk? Come meet me at my office. No big deal, just when you have a sec." Marcin spun around in his chair, stood up, and walked to his boss's office.

The day after I finished "Final Fantasy VII," I sat down for lunch with some friends who had also completed the game. We all enjoyed it, but felt it wasn't all it could have been. We thought we -- a group of jobless, inexperienced students with no resources -- could do better. I was the only one who had ever flipped through a book on C++, so I became lead developer. Tony, who'd never used a computer for anything except playing "The Oregon Trail," had a knack for drawing and became lead artist. Everyone else (Dan and Tim) was split up between writing (Dan) and marketing (Tim). How hard could it be?

After a few years at a large, soulless corporate conglomerate, "Henry L." needed a change. Since his skills were in high demand, he had no trouble lining up interviews at several other large, soulless corporate conglomerates. He'd grown tired of working at such large companies, though, and started looking into some smaller businesses.

Ever since the first Free Sticker Week ended back in February '07, I've been sending out WTF Stickers to anyone that mailed me a SASE or a small Souvenir. Nothing specific, per the instructions page, "anything will do." Well, here goes anything, again! (first one here)

I was introduced to bug tracking software many years back at my second programming job. And by “introduced”, I mean forced – practically at gunpoint – to use it. And boy, did I hate it. Why do I have to put every stupid thing I do, I remember thinking, whether it’s a stupid bug or not, in some stupid system so some stupid project manager can look at my stupid tasks?

Business was booming. Smartypants Software was selling licenses for their fancy new web portal software about as fast as they could generate license keys. Developers were working later and later into the night, and the tech support staff could hardly catch their breath between calls.

Every so often, Bob B. observed that his company's e-commerce site would crash-hard. No one had any clue as to why it happened, but everyone knew how to fix it. Restart both the IIS and SQL Server processes and, voilà, within a minute, the site was up and running again.

1999 was a big year for Harvard Business School Publishing. In the past few years, they had seen their business model – selling books, journals, articles, case studies, and so forth – transform from being entirely catalogue-based to largely web-based, and it had finally come time for a major re-launch of their website.