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After a 6-year enlistment with the United States Air Force, followed by a 4-year degree in Computer Science (paid for by “Uncle Sam”), Tony S. joined with a small company that specialized in criminal background checks. “No more unpaid overtime!” he’d thought to himself upon joining the civilian world for the first time since high school. “No more screaming officers! No more sleepless nights from trying to meet deadlines!”
"I agree, Google. When it comes to news coverage of politically sensitive topics, many errors have occurred," writes Scott.
A new codebase at a new job is a lot like a new relationship: everything’s great until you really get to know each other. Just ask Bradley, who joined Javatechsoft Industries a few months ago. He was brought on to lend a hand with an overdue project. The pay was good, the job came with life insurance, and he had plenty of experience with Enterprise Java. It seemed like the perfect fit.
It feels like forever ago, we introduced the Lucky Deuce casino contest. This is a series of challenges, brought to you by our pals over at Infragistics, where we call on you to help us build a “scoundrel’s casino”. We are nearing the end of this little BYOC contest- this week is our last "all original" round, and next week, we'll introduce one final challenge that leverages code you may have already written for this contest.
Last week, you had a tricky little problem: you needed to write some code that looked like it was going to cheat, but really would get the cheater caught.
Pavel D inherited some… we’ll call it “software”… that helps run warehouse operations for a boiler/heating manufacturer. That software was a Visual FoxPro database.
Now, this application needs to read barcodes off of products in the warehouse. Since the laser-scanners can sometimes mis-read those barcodes, the database uses a custom check-sum algorithm.
Greg never thought he’d meet a real-life mentat.
“We’re so happy to have you aboard,” said Jordan, the CEO of IniTech. She showed Greg to the back end of the office, to a closed door marked with just one word: Frank. Jordan, not bothering to knock, opening the door.
"Figures. A suggestion devoid of meaning," writes Blake R..
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Mr. Reynholm took great pride in his technical knowledge. Of course, as is often the case with CEOs and self-appointed CTOs of technology startups, that didn't necessarily mean he possessed any in the first place. But what Mr. Reynholm lacked in skills, he made up for in charisma. His designer suit, Brilliantine-laden hair, and the ability to turn a reading of El Reg with a thesaurus into a business pitch kept the company afloat despite the lack of any real product to speak of.
Two weeks back, we introduced the Lucky Deuce casino contest. This is a series of challenges, brought to you by our pals over at Infragistics, where we call on you to help us build a “scoundrel’s casino”.
Last Week, you were again given some vague requirements, this time for building a broken slot machine. Once again, we had some seriously great submissions. Like last week, I’ve rehosted the winning code here.
Having automated tests for a project is a good thing, as a general rule. We can debate the broader merits of “TDD”, “ATDD”, “BDD”, “ATBDDSM”, how much test coverage is actually worth having, and if we should view our test approach as a series of metrics that must be met, instead of some guidelines that will help improve our development process.
Our first exhibit today is from Paul. It’s a JUnit test, that, well, maybe misses the point of writing unit tests:
Data Security. We all need to deal with it. There are many tried and true ways of doing things. Many of the problems you'll encounter have been solved. Some of them will require creative thinking. All require a basic understanding of the difference between big thing and little thing. Not everyone possesses the ability to differentiate between the two.
R.J. works for a health insurance company. These folks have access to some of our most private information, and take HIPAA regulations to secure and protect it quite seriously. Any breach of security requires notifying customers of potential exposure, as well as reporting to government imps bureaucrats better not dealt with. Naturally, the bean counters from the board on down all repeat the mantra of protecting the customer data at all costs.
"No! Never! Absolutely not!...Well, OK, back in college. Just once," writes Jack R..
As tends to happen with people who do good work, Robert got pulled away from his XMPP system to save another project from sinking. It would continue to work well enough on its own without much hand-holding. When new nodes needed to be added to the system, that duty fell to Robert's coworker Jens. He kept complaining that it was too much work to pair the new nodes with the XMPP server, but Robert brushed it off because for someone like Jens, tying his shoes was too much work.
Jens had been mysteriously quiet about the XMPP setup duties for a while, before he randomly shouted "I just showed you up, Bobby!" one day. Robert assumed he accomplished something meaningless like topping the office high score in Tetris. "Since your XMPP system is so hard to maintain, I took the opportunity to make some improvements! No more painful setup!"
Last week, we introduced the Lucky Deuce casino contest. This is a series of challenges, brought to you by our pals over at Infragistics, where we call on you to help us build a “scoundrel’s casino”.
Last week’s challenge was to build a “broken” roulette wheel, that instead of being truly random, avoids recently spun numbers to “feel” more random. I’ve rehosted all of the winners’ code here.
If there's one thing more exhausting and ridiculously over-complicated than moving house, it's moving legacy apps. Something as simple as a migration to another, identically configured (in theory) server can cause unexplained breakages and weird glitches in bits of the code no current staff member has ever touched.
As someone who has spent more than three decades working for all manner of huge financial-conglomerate IT departments, I've seen pretty much every kind of WTF imaginable. At every level. At every scale. For years, I chose to view it as getting paid for being entertained. But over time, it dawned on me that perhaps the reason these companies are so inept at IT is that they're so focused on the job of getting business done that they can't take the time needed to learn to think through a software development project in the way you need to in order to, well, develop software.
This time around, I joined a fairly small financial firm that has a reputation for being fairly laid back. Most of the reviews by current and former employees stated that the management allowed them the time to (reasonably) properly plan out and run a software development project. I spoke with several managers, all of whom assured me that the project was reasonably budgeted for the appropriate folks (developers, QA testers, business analysts, project managers, architects, etc.). Requirements were being mandated by an industry edict. My role was simply to be one of more than 100 Java developers on the project.
"I'm not sure if the WTF is that I have to find 0000FF]2 piles of dirty clothes," Simon H. writes, "or the fact that the ']' makes it look like they entered the information in something resembling BBCODE."
Pardon the clickbait headline. We’re only going to look at one method to tell if an item is in a list. A bad one.
Andrew M. inherited some software that tracks metrics. There are three general categories of metrics- “MS”, “FN”, and “CM”. Each of these categories contains a number of specific metrics, each assigned its own ID.
The life of a developer is about being cunning. When presented a problem that could be solved with strenuous, character-building labor, our first instinct is to automate it and cheat our way around it, if at all possible.
Or maybe I’m just projecting. Still, if there’s one thing I’ve noticed, TDWTF readers are a shifty lot of scoundrels. It’s time for us to put that cunning to work.
IT jobs are few and far between in the rural United States. Calvin considered it pure luck that he got a new job as a developer in his home town, a small Southern town of only 5,000 people. After a few short interviews, he gladly accepted the job, eager to give up his long commute to another city and stay close to home.
Scott K was cleaning up a configuration utility used by his team when he dredged up this sanity-threatening artifact:
Jul 15
void Save(string path)
{
XmlTextWriter write = null;
try
{
write = new XmlTextWriter(path, null);
}
catch (IOException)
{
write.WriteEndDocument();
write.Close();
try
{
write = new XmlTextWriter(path, null);
}
catch (IOException)
{
return;
}
}
// Write stuff to the file
}