Feature Articles

It was the early 1990s and Frank was living the dream – unshaven, in pajama bottoms and his favorite hockey jersey, having just woken up at 12:18 PM, was now working in the dim light of his basement on one of his freelance projects. Just as he was sipping a cup of coffee, the phone rang.

Rick worked for a regional ISP that provided hosting services. The customer base consisted primarily of consumers and small businesses, so the ISP offered a lot of "a la carte" services for things like SSL, authentication and database access.

"Is this campus tech support?," the caller said before Michael even had a chance to say hello, "I hope this isn't a recording because we have a serious problem with one of the detectors here. It won't open files!!"

Matt was excited: he had landed his first real web development job. Granted, it pretty far down on the totem pole – webmaster for a local wholesaler – but it was a foot in the door. Next job he might have the opportunity to do a little bit of PHP. And the job after that, maybe some MySQL. Soon enough, he’d be a full-fledged developer with a résumé overflowing with buzzwords from AJAX to Zend.

Back in the early 90's, Marcus worked for a company we'll call SuperbNet. They were the European equivalent of CompuServe and a boasted a continent-wide network that you could dial-in to to post messages, share pictures, chat interactively, and so on. But unlike CompuServe, SuperbNet's infrastructure was built for reliability using specialized Tandem servers that could never fail.

NPR Is Reading My Email (from Tom) I was on a teleconference one day and saw another call coming through. It was Heather Jenkins, a fairly common caller to tech support, so I decided to send the call to voicemail. Whatever it was, it could wait.

Chest puffed out and walking absurdly fast, Dietrich called out various rooms as they passed. "Built in the 70s, you'll find our building is an absolutely stunning marvel – processing room! – of modern architecture. Top to bottom, function has – restroom! – dictated the form. You'll find no unnecessary extravagences – another restroom! – within these walls." His heels clicked and echoed as he led Chris S. and another fresh-faced recruit on the grand tour of RNTP's corporate building.

"Support ain't gonna be no big deal," Scott B.'s boss told him, "it's a weighbridge fer cryin' out loud! They don't got no movin' parts and they ain't gonna go breakin' in the middl'a the night."

Years ago, Peter worked as a highlyly paid IT consultant. You know those guys who come into the office in Italian suits and take over the large conference room as their "office" for six weeks? Well, Peter was one of those guys. But unlike the stereotype, he actually earned his hourly rate while applying his expert experience to several projects. He also had the luxury of working with some very highly skilled (and also highly paid) professional colleagues.

Since I got tied up on a lovely production failure yesterday (hence the Classic), I figured today'd be the perfect day to rehash "//TODO: Uncomment Later", originally pulished on March 14th, 2007.

"Stu-dennnt!" Bill called out for Gary with the level of respect Gary had become accustomed to, in a tone not unlike Superintendent Chalmers's calling for Principal Skinner. "Is this... decaf‽"