Alex Papadimoulis

Alex is a speaker and writer who is passionate about looking beyond the code to build great software. In addition to founding Inedo - the makers of BuildMaster, the popular continuous delivery platform - Alex also started The Daily WTF, a fun site dedicated to building software the wrong way.

Classic WTF: Worse Than Failure

by in Best of… on
So, it's a holiday in the US, and I'll be honest: the way I pick my holiday posts is by hitting the "Random Article" button until something fun pops out. And this time around, it gave me something to be thankful for: that this remains "The Daily WTF" and not… something Worse Than Failure. --Remy

Final Update: thankfully this is all nothing but an embarrassing memory.

As you can probably tell by now, The Daily WTF is now named Worse Than Failure. Don’t worry – nothing else is changing – it’s still the same ole’ WTF.


Classic WTF: Insecurity Doors

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It's Thanksgiving day in the US, and today, I'm thankful I'm not the person who had to spend the weekend hastily attaching baffles to 650 doors in a skyscraper because no one thought about how motion sensors worked. Original --Remy

It was a heck of a party and everyone was invited, from the executive vice president to the janitorial staff. There was champagne, shrimp, cake, and even a string quartet. There were door prizes, balloons, and all sorts of bank-branded knickknacks being given away. And it was all for good reason: the bank had just completed its high-tech, sixty-five story downtown corporate headquarters, and it was the tallest building within a three-hundred mile radius.

Virtually no expense was spared for the bank's skyscraper: a renowned architect was commissioned to design the building, skilled artisans adorned the corridors with marble statues, acoustical consultants made sure the lobby had just the right echo, and, most importantly, the world's foremost security firm was brought in to lock things down tighter than Fort Knox. It was considered less of a building and more of a work of art. The pinnacle of this creation was the high-tech sliding doors used throughout the building; this was the first time that StarTrek-esque doors were used on such a large scale.


Classic Errord: Phone Pain

by in Error'd on
We're reaching back for a blast-from-the-past for today's Errord, all the way from 2009. How little things really change. Original - Remy

"This phone booth in Windhoek is obviously in distress," Chris Pliers writes, "who should I call?"


Classic WTF: Security By Oblivity

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It's a holiday in the US, so once again, it's time to reach back into the archives. Two-Factor Authentication is pretty standard these days, but once upon a time, it felt far more cumbersome to use. This story from 2006 highlights some… unique solutions to the problem. Original --Remy

Laptops are blessing for many corporate workers: never before has it been so easy to bring work home and neglect one's family to get in a few extra hours of unpaid overtime. As eager as employees are to do this, the mean ole' folks in IT Security are not. They cite all these news stories about sensitive data being lost as a result of laptops and remote access, and say it's just not safe to bring the company work home.

Thankfully, the IT Security director at MK's company (a fairly large banking institution) knows that the ability to conveniently work remotely is much more important than working securely. Shortly after some mean ole' regulatory agency mandated that remote access is secured with a VPN that requires typing in a constantly changing passcode from a physical token, the director had just the solution for everyone ...


Classic WTF: Very, Very Well Documented

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It's Independence Day in the US, but today, let's instead celebrate our dependence on good quality documentation. It matters. Even when we measure the size of that documentation in meters, instead of freedom units. Original -- Remy

Just about all of the systems I’ve written about here share quite a few things in common: they are poorly designed, poorly coded, and even more poorly documented. Today, I’m happy to share with you a system that doesn’t quite fit in with all the rest. It’s actually very sound software and, most of all, it’s well documented. Very, very well documented.

George Nacht is a software engineer in certain a Post-Communist European country. In the mid-1990’s, his government decided that it was time to replace their foreign, Soviet-era fighter jets with modern, less expensive aircrafts of domestic design. And since they were modernizing their fleet, they decided to modernize their pilot training as well. This meant that new, interactive flight-simulator software needed to be developed.


Classic WTF: Back That Thang Up

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We're still away for our summer break, skimming our inbox and horrified by all the things you're sending us. Keep doing it. Speaking of horrors, this one's about backups. You know what's about to happen… Original. -- Remy

It ain't easy being number one, especially for R.B.'s company. With €730 million in annual revenues, they're the leader in a relatively small (€1.6 billion) niche market and are constantly struggling to maintain their dominance amongst a handful of vicious competitors. Recently, an executive at the company came up with an astonishingly brilliant plan that would ensure that they stayed on top for many years to come. This plan was named The Convergence.

The Convergence was, in all seriousness, a really good idea. It represented a completely new way of doing business that relied heavily on technology and its ability to integrate the supply chain with the customer experience. It would do nothing short of revolutionizing their entire industry, leaving their competitors struggling just to stay afloat.


Classic WTF: The Source Control Shingle

by in Feature Articles on
It's still a short summer break for a few more days, as always, keep those submissions filling our inbox while we're away. In the meantime, we're also into peak homebuying season. A friend of mine needed a new roof as part of her purchase. Roofs are important, as they provide vital protection for your structure. Unless that structure is your source code… Original. --Remy

The year was 1999 and the dot-com boom was going full-throttle. Companies everywhere were focused on building revolutionary applications using nothing but top-shelf hardware and state-of-the-art software tools. Developers everywhere were trying to figure out if they should play more foosball, more air hockey, or sit back down on their Aeron and write more code. Everywhere, that is, except Boise, Idaho. Or at least, Dave's small corner of it.

At Dave's company, developers worked at a solid pace, using reliable tools, for a stable industry. They were sub-sub-contractors on a giant project commissioned by the U.S. Navy to condense naval vessel documentation. Generally speaking, the complete documentation required for a modern warship-from the GPS calibration instructions to the giant 130-millimeter cannon repair guide-is measured in tons. By condensing the documentation into the electronic equivalent, they could not only save tremendous physical space, but they could make it much easier to navigate.


Classic WTF: Front-Ahead Design

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Summer breaks are a great opportunity to improve yourself. And what's a better way to use your summer break than to take some high end certification training. Prove that you're ready for the FAD! Original --Remy

In the past, I didn’t mix TDWTH and work too often, but with the tweaked name and tweaked direction on content, I knew this article would be a perfect fit.

As some of you know, I fill two important roles in my day job at Inedo, LLC. Not only am I a software developer, but I’m also the Chief Front-Ahead Design Evangelist. In this latter role, it’s my duty to spread and champion the revolutionary software development methodology known as Front Ahead Design (FAD).


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