Feature Articles

It's Black Friday! For those of you stuck at work (or not in the US), here's a fun classic. Smooth, Like a Factory was originally published on November 9th, 2006.

Back in the late-1990s, the Internet Service Provider where Simon C. worked was a mere micro-sized version of what they are today. Their website's original e-commerce system only needed to sell one thing — domain names, and a limited subset of them at that — so the shopping basket and invoicing parts of the system didn't need to be all that intelligent. They simply looped through each item ordered by the customer, displayed the description and prices of each one, and worked out the totals at the end. The whole process was so simple in fact that it made sense to the original developer to write the system so that the shopping cart and invoicing pages shared the same code.

I have never written a bad line of code.

Michael P. was feeling pretty tense – and really, who could blame him?

I'm at the Business of Software conference in San Francisco this week and thought it'd be the perfect opportuntunity to revisit a classic. Don't Worry, We'll Fix It! was originally published on November 28, 2006.

Keepin' It Cool was originally published on October 4, 2006 A few years ago, Phil was working as a developer on a wire transfer application at a large bank. To make sure that nothing technical would prevent the bank from extracting maximum amounts of money from its operations, every part of their system had a redundancy with fast failovers and clustering. In fact, there was even one server (and a backup of that server) whose only function was to monitor the other server and send notifications if anything fell out of the operations norm.