Alex F is suffering from a disease. No, it’s not disfiguring, it’s not fatal. It’s something much worse than that.

It’s MUMPS.

Lucio Crusca is a consultant with a nice little portfolio of customers he works with. One of those customers was also a consultancy, and their end customer had a problem. The end customer's only in-house developer, Tyrell, was leaving. He’d worked there for 8 years, and nobody else knew anything about his job, his code, or really what exactly he’d been doing for 8 years.

They had two weeks to do a knowledge transfer before Tyrell was out the door. There was no chance of on-boarding someone in that time, so they wanted a consultant who could essentially act as a walking, talking USB drive, simply holding all of Tyrell’s knowledge until they could have a full-time developer.

If there’s one big problem with XML, it’s arguably that XML is overspecified. That’s not all bad- it means that every behavior, every option, every approach is documented, schematized, and defined. That might result in something like SOAP, which creates huge, bloated payloads, involves multiple layers of wrapping tags, integrates with discovery schemas, has additional federation and in-built security mechanisms, each of which are themselves defined in XML. And let’s not even start on XSLT and XQuery.

It also means that if you have a common task, like embedding arbitrary content in a safe fashion, there’s a well-specified and well-documented way to do it. If you did want to embed arbitrary content in a safe fashion, you could use the <![CDATA [Here is some arbitrary content]]> directive. It’s not a pretty way of doing it, but it means you don’t have to escape anything but ]]>, which is only a problem in certain esoteric programming languages with rude names.

There are merits and disadvantages to including any sort of programming challenge in your interview process. The argument for something like a FizzBuzz challenge is that a surprising number of programmers can’t actually do that, and it weeds out the worst candidates and the liars.

Gareth was interviewing someone who purported to be a senior developer with loads of Java experience. As a standard part of their interview process, they do a little TDD based exercise: “here’s a test, here’s how to run it, now write some code which passes the test.”