Recent Feature Articles

May 2016

The Mainframe Database

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IBM System360 Mainframe

George, an independent contractor, usually spent his first day home from a business trip plowing through the emails that'd piled up in his absence. In the midst of this grind, he received a call from Lucinda, a Microsoft contact from South Africa.


Say "Y" to Indexes

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Henry was a hotshot developer working on a team that specialized in performance tuning. When other teams in his company had performance problems they couldn’t solve, Henry’s team was called in. Through profiling, analysis of algorithms, and database tuning, his team excelled at turning inefficient, slow, bug-ridden software into applications that actually did real work in a timely manner.

Usually.


Indomitable Stupidity

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This is the story of Stacy and John.


Unprocessed Payments

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Ivan worked for a mobile games company that mass-produced “freemium” games. These are the kinds of games you download and play for free, but you can pay for in-game items or perks to make the game easier–or in some cases, possible to beat once you get about halfway through the game.

Since that entire genre is dependent upon microtransactions, you’d think developers would have rock-solid payment code that rarely failed. Code that worked almost all the time, that was nearly unhackable, and would provide a steady stream of microtransactions to pay everybody’s salary. But who am I kidding? This is The Daily WTF! Of course reliable in-app payment code for a company completely dependent on microtransactions isn’t going to happen!


Double Play

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How to play baseball, a manual for boys (1914) (14763970952)

Contracting seemed the best way for Ann-Marie to gain a foothold in the IT industry. She wasn't the best or the brightest, and her CV was heavy on toy languages and light on experience. But if she got a good solid chance, she knew her no-nonsense attitude and general intelligence would endear her to her boss.


The EDI Fall Back

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Chris M. was a developer at Small Widget Manufacturing. He and his coworker Scott were, in theory, assigned only to developing their in-house ERP software. However, with just one person running the company’s help desk, they often picked up anything considered “software-related.”

A ticket pinged Chris’s inbox: EDI Running Slow. It was from a sales rep named Brett, and like most tickets from sales reps, was marged Urgent. Chris decided to play ball, since Scott was tied up with something else. He called Brett, asking if he could elaborate.


That 70's Paper Mill

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The late Seventies was a lucrative time for Finnish-based Kirkniemi Paperi, a paper production powerhouse. Puoval had a great opportunity to cash in on the profits by helping to integrate a completely automated, computer-based production system. His degree in electronic engineering was finally going to pay off.

Thanks to the invention of the Intel 8085 microprocessor, it became possible to turn trees in to paper quicker than ever. Puoval had a mandate from Kirkniemi ownership to spare no expense with getting the system up and running since their biggest competitor implemented a similar system the year before. But if they had a bumpy rollout, it would be incredibly damaging to both the company and Puoval's livelihood. Painting of paper-making at Hahnemühle


Congraubullations

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“Java and C# are kind of the same thing, right?”

Josh was a Java developer, but his company was doing a big upgrade of some .NET applications written years earlier by a developer named Ray. Ray had left the company the previous year, and somebody needed to help port his .NET 2.5 code to .NET 4.0 and a new version of IIS. Josh was a team player, and also knew that newer versions of .NET were almost always backwards compatible, so he didn’t expect it to create that much work for him.


Mercy the Mercenary in… a Heated Argument

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Last time, Mercy found out the political campaign she was working for didn't have a candidate that was in his best health- but they were pushing him into the governor's mansion anyway. In today's finale, she confronts a hacker and a harsh reality…

Mercy cringed as Ellis waved her over to his laptop. She left her usual workspace next to the hamilton server and headed to where Ellis had holed up. On his laptop she saw a YouTube video, playing one of Rockwood’s stump speeches. “We can’t have the YouTube logo on here anymore,” he said, indicating the “Righteous Rants” design. The red and white logo clashed loudly with the Thomas Kinkade-inspired backgrounds Ellis had picked at random from a stock photo site. “Can you make it go away? We can’t be seen to endorse a company like that.”