What Happens in Massachusetts...

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2016-04-29

"I came across this while submitting to a background check for a new job," writes Jay S., "Good to know that felonious behavior in Boston is perfectly acceptable."

31 comments - Last comment @ 2016-10-26

Interned Sort

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-04-28

Caleb scored his first intership at a small, family-owned print-shop. Much to his surprise, the day before he started, their primary web-developer left for a bigger, more lucrative job. His predecssor was an experienced programmer, but came at solving problems in his own unique way. This meant no comments, no functions, no classes, SQL injection vulnerabilities everywere, and cryptic 500-character one-liners stuffed into the value attribute of an input tag.

Caleb spent his first day just trying to get the code running on his dev machine. On the second day, he sat down with a more experienced co-worker to try and understand some of the queries. For example, there was one query that needed to return product details sorted in some meaningful fashion- like by name. Weirdly, though, the page wasn’t sorting them by name, except when it was- no one who used the product search understood the sort order.

30 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-10

Twisted Branches

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2016-04-27

David pulled his headphones off when he heard a loud harrumph behind him. One of his project managers loomed in the doorway, and had obviously been standing there for some time, trying to get David’s attention.

“You pulled from Staging-Core branch into the Version–2 branch and broke Liam’s changes,” the PM said.

48 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-17

See You Last Saturday

by Jane Bailey in CodeSOD on 2016-04-26

One of the more difficult things for beginning programmers to pick up is computer-minded thinking. Sure, if you're reading this, it's probably easy for you to look at a system and plot out how to get the outputs you want in one area out of the information you have in another. For someone who's been programming for years, it's practically second nature. When mentoring interns or teaching beginners, however, it can readily become apparent just how strange this mindset can be to newcomers.

34 comments - Last comment @ 2016-05-25

Mercy the Mercenary in… The App Store

by Erik Gern in Feature Articles on 2016-04-25

We return with the penultimate installment of the tale of Mercy, the Mercenary Developer. Last time, she implemented a countdown clock- but nobody told her what it was counting down to, because nobody knew.

It was standing-room only at Rockwood for Governor campaign headquarters. All the tables had been pushed to the walls or folded and stowed away; most of the chairs were stacked. Volunteers milled about, eating delivery pizza, wings, and (probably spiked) soda.

45 comments - Last comment @ 2016-05-25

Paula Lives

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2016-04-22

"While poking around on my brand new Galaxy S7, I was tempted to pick one ringtone in particular," writes Ronon D..

31 comments - Last comment @ 2016-04-26

Mysterious Mysteries of Strange Mystery

by Remy Porter in Coded Smorgasbord on 2016-04-21

Code is a window into the programmer’s mind. Our thought processes are laid bare, exposed and cemented for all eternity in keywords and symbols. It’s left there, waiting for another programmer to come by and wonder: “What were they thinking?”

That’s exactly what “seebs” was wondering, when he found this PHP code.

37 comments - Last comment @ 2016-05-24

Enterprise Automation

by TJ Mott in Feature Articles on 2016-04-20

Rex had just been hired on with a large retailer as a Puppet Automation Engineer, tasked with using Puppet Labs to automate deployments of some SAP-py, enterprisey software. He was paired up with another Puppet Automation Engineer, Alexi. Alexi was the expert, and he was in charge of automating the company’s Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) auditing.

Alexei was a firm believer that the Customer Is Always Wrong, and Alexei Knows Best. As a consequence, he thought that any requirements he didn’t like could be changed to arbitrary ones he did like. If the customer wanted a report that provided some summarized sales numbers for the year and he thought that was stupid, he’d instead give them a report showing their top product’s Line-Of-Code count divided by the Dow Jones Industrial Average for the month. If they wanted to slice-and-dice their customer database by demographics, he would code up a line graph relating the number of characters in their last name to the average nightly lows on their date of birth.

These are Sarbanes and Oxley, but you can imagine these are the characters of this story.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2016-04-23

And It's Collated

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-04-19

As anyone who’s ever written a c-style char * string knows, strings are much more complicated than they look. This is even more true in this modern era of Unicode and character encodings and multilingual applications. How does “ä” compare to “a” or “á”?

John Moore’s company sent some code to a contracting firm. They needed to strip off any diacritics and unusual characters when they were comparing strings, so that “ä” and “å” were treated as the same character when searching- a not uncommon problem. In Java, there’s a special family of classes inheriting from Collator which can be used to solve exactly that problem. Now, most developers aren’t deeply familiar with these, so seeing a contractor that turns in a more “home brewed” approach is hardly surprising.

40 comments - Last comment @ 2016-05-17

Mercy the Mercenary in… The (not so) Final Countdown

by Erik Gern in Feature Articles on 2016-04-18

In the continuing saga of Mercy the Mercenary, she continues to struggle with a political campaign- Rockwood for Governor- and its backwards approach to IT. Last time, she had an uphill battle getting the kit to keep their website up.

The request seemed so simple, Mercy knew. Embed a video inside an email message.

43 comments - Last comment @ 2016-09-26

TAYLOR VS. TIME

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2016-04-15

You know that new Taylor Swift treadmill commercial? Looks like there's a little bit of a sync issue between the time on her phone and the analog clock icon at 0:05.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-06

Parsimony

by Jane Bailey in CodeSOD on 2016-04-14

When I was but a wee lass, the internet was still a wild, untamed place. Before the advent of walled gardens and minifiers, long before Facebook, you could learn everything you needed to know about web programming using one simple tool: View -> Source.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2016-04-20

A Testy Voice

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2016-04-13

“This,” Gregor said by way of introduction, “is Jack. Jack’s our new highly paid consultant.”

Rita shook Jack’s hand. Jack was the kind of person who entered a handshake with a dominant, overhand approach, and then applied too much pressure while he smiled at you. He wanted you to know, he was a take charge kind of guy.

34 comments - Last comment @ 2017-04-28

Tough Cookies

by Ellis Morning in CodeSOD on 2016-04-12

Back in 2007, Dimitry worked on a website that received millions of unique visitors.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2016-07-21

Mercy the Mercenary in… The Cloud

by Erik Gern in Feature Articles on 2016-04-11

The tale of Mercy the Mercenary Developer continues. Last week Mercy became the IT support for a political campaign because she knew how to stream from a cellphone, and thus knew more than anyone working at the campaign.

Mercy ground her teeth. Her wifi connection in Rockwood’s campaign headquarters had dropped again.

44 comments - Last comment @ 2022-02-22

Please Ignore the Progress Bar

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2016-04-08

"Honesty like this should be rewarded - whole dialog box warning that the install progress bar is absolutely crap," wrote John A.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2016-05-17

isAlive

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-04-07

Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? What does it even mean to be alive?

No, I haven’t been hanging out in coffee shops wearing a beret and discussing philosophy. I’ve instead been puzzling over this code, from Nikolai K.

42 comments - Last comment @ 2016-04-29

Tokyo TDWTF Meetup

by Alex Papadimoulis in Announcements on 2016-04-06

UPDATE: April 22 will be the day!

Tokyo readers, I'll be in your fine city this month -- and that means it's time for another Tokyo/TDWTF nomihoudai! It's always a fun time, and we've got a good group of regulars now. Here's a pic of a group of us from a past meetup:

0 comments - Last comment @ -none-

The Pagemaster

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2016-04-06

Amanda supported and maintained a website through which clients managed their own data. Occasionally, she’d read through access logs in search of unwanted scrapers, rogue bots, and hack attempts.

Her diligence paid off when she caught on to a particular IP that was making a huge amount of requests throughout the day. Page after page of results were being requested less than a second after another, as with a typical scraper bot:

47 comments - Last comment @ 2017-07-04

The Three Second Rule

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-04-05

The “Five Second Rule” is, of course, a myth. If you drop a food item on the ground, the bacteria living on the ground aren’t going to wait five seconds before moving in. Besides, everything you stuff in your face is already covered with all sorts of bacteria anyway. You have an immune system, you might as well use it.

Adolphus Mannz recently gave his immune system a bit of a workout. In their SalesForce system, they needed a way to determine if a record was being added to the system or updated, and perform some slightly different logic in each case. His fellow developer came up with this rather ugly solution.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2023-03-20

Mercy the Mercenary in… Trouble at the Town Hall

by Erik Gern in Feature Articles on 2016-04-04

Mercy Francis sat inside a drab, storefront office. The walls were covered in posters, captioned the words Rockwood for Governor, for a Righteous Florida! To her right was a map of Florida covered in multi-colored thumbtacks. Below the map sat an aging desktop machine. On its case was slapped a piece of masking tape marked Rover.

Across from her sat Barbie Sullivan. She appeared to be in her fifties, just over five feet high, with a greying bob cut. She had introduced herself as the campaign manager.

34 comments - Last comment @ 2023-10-24

Radio WTF: A Day of Mei

by Lorne Kates in Feature Articles on 2016-04-01

Radio WTF Presents!

Jump to transcript

Soundcloud Links: Radio WTF: A Day of Mei

Direct Download: ADayOfMei.mp3

Starring (in order of appearance) Devin Sweeny... as Mei
Alex Papadimoulis... as Nathan
Lorne Kates... as Luke
Patrick Roach... as Phillip
Remy Porter... as Samuel

31 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-05

Saskatche-what's-it?

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2016-04-01

"I know we are special here in Saskatchewan but I don't think we need 10 different choices," wrote Mike.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-05

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