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Before Chris W. took a stab at optimizing the below code, it had been a pain in the neck of his employer for a looong time.
Running in a call center, it loops through agents stored in a database table, queries their queues and the skills on the queue. It then inserts a record in another table for each combination.
Stored Procedures (from Liz)
There was an article posted a little while back (Does Not Compute) that featured confusion of fairly-common tech-isms like Cookies or the Recycle Bin. It was fun, but not terribly surprising considering that everyone is not technically inclined.
I was surprised, however, when a Does Not Compete happened during an interview for a database developer position. My question was fairly straightforward: tell me about your experience with stored procedures.
"I recently was hired by a very large company as a software developer, and I couldn't wait to start," writes Philipp B, "Having mostly worked for small shops, this seemed like a great opportunity to see how large teams of developers build and maintain complex business applications."
"It turned out to be quite the opportunity. Databases? Naaah... just use a bunch of XML (or sometimes CSV) files. Deployments? Naaah... just copy the project files (including the source code) to the 'wwwroot' folder on the web server. Architecture... definitely! Copy/paste is a pattern, right?" One thing that was common was the vast amount of code to do seemingly simple things. For example, determine whether Yes ('ja') or No ('nein') should be displayed on a report."
Gary was sitting at the local café, enjoying his morning coffee and a muffin. He was taking a well-deserved break following a release of his new client’s software the day before when he spotted his old manager Steve walking toward him.
"Gary!" Steve shouted. "I was just about to give you a call!"
“For the past six months,” Jose C writes, “I’ve been struggling with our vendor – let’s call them ‘Enterprise Associates’ – to get the source code for the Enterprise module of their ‘Enterprise ERP for Enterprises’ software. Now we normally don’t expect source code from vendor software, but this was specifically in our contract. Partially because they wrote it on our dime, but mostly because we needed to do some serious customization to make it work.”
“They delivered excuse after excuse after excuse, but they all were something like, ‘we are still ensuring our code meets Enterprise Associates release standards and that it is fully documented and supportable by our Enterprise support team.’ And then finally, it came.”
For as long as David B could remember, stories of The Phantom Duo were a popular pastime around the watercooler. Of course, no one had actually worked with them, but everyone knew someone who knew someone that did. And the tall tales told why.
As the story went, The Phantom Duo were corporate boogeymen who reported to no one. They’d scour the project charter, looking for healthy, on-time, and on-budget projects that they could latch-on to. Once they were assigned to a project, it was too late: anything they’d touch would crash and burn, taking everyone else with it. Obviously, since anyone who worked with The Phantom Duo would no longer be working, only hearsay and rumor supported the legend.
When Mike's manager asked if he'd like to take a stab at doing some maintenance on the Freight Calculator, naturally, he agreed.
After all, like many manager requests, it's not like he really had a choice in the matter, though Mike sorely wished that he did. The Freight Calculator, a MS Access/VBA "app", was previously maintained by a former fellow developer named Trent who had moved on to supposedly greener pastures a few weeks earlier. Like many in the department, Mike often heard Trent cursing under his breath any time he walked past so his departure was not at all unexpected. Though Trent was the only developer who had delved into the inner workings of the Freight Calculator, it already carried a reputation throughout the department as being a nightmare application to support. A reputation that Mike soon witnessed as being well earned.
Now, it wasn’t that Gary was an unlikeable person, he just had a pompous arrogant attitude that got in the way of coworkers in Jake’s workplace from getting to know the true, “hidden” Gary. A self-proclaimed “genius developer extraordinaire”, he was famous around the office for two things.
First being…pointing out how much of a genius he is! During his morning rounds, Gary would strike up a conversation about his latest round of changes saved the company untold sums of money, all the while, sprinkling in words like “instantiate” and “overload” as often and as irrelevantly as possible.
Last month, rachetingDateObject showed us something a little different: a curious perversions that was actually created by the submitter. This time, Brian F decided to share his story.
Do you have any confessions you'd like to make? Send them on in.
"From the first minute of the first hour of the first day of my job," Aaron writes, "I knew I had an epic WTF on my hands."
"I spent a while writing up a 1,600-word long description of this system, only to realize it wasn’t nearly enough. So I kept going. 1,950 words… still not enough. 2,300 words… barely scratching the surface.
Please take a moment to check out the companies that sponsor The Daily WTF.
TDWTF Sponsors
ChangeVision - makers of astah*, a comprehensive modeling toolset that works with UML, ERD, DFD and mind mapping models within the same integrated platform. There's both a free trial and a free community edition available. They also put out a pretty unique guide called Zen and The Art of User Requirements that's worth a quick read. BuildMaster - an easy way to automate your build, deploy, and configuration process all the way through production. Basically, it's application lifecycle management the way it should be: platform neutral, process neutral, and tool neutral. SoftLayer - serious hosting provider with datacenters in three cities (Dallas, Seattle, DC) that has plans designed to scale from a single, dedicated server to your own virtual data center (complete with racks and all)
And now, for something completely different... or at least a little fun and off-topic.
It's time once again for Bizarre Emails Day! Got one your self? Then mail in your mail!
"It's a good thing unit tests can be turned off so that the build succeeds," Botia wrote, "Otherwise, how could we ever get the changes into production?"
"We recently implemented the webservice interface from our vendors," Eric writes, "they're a large and generally well-respected software service firm."
"Their webservice returns SOAP messages — which is just fine — but instead of returning a useful XML string, it returns this."
Rob's employer didn't need a summer intern, let alone a paid intern. This absence of need conflicted directly with the Director of Engineering's need to find his son a summer job while he was home from college. In the battle between Frugality and Nepotism, there could be only one victor, and plenty of collateral damage.
On his first day, Chris arrived wearing jean-shorts and a stained Boba Fett t-shirt that wasn't quite long enough to reach his waistband, which itself wasn't quite broad enough to completely contain his waist. He exuded the faint aroma of Cheetos and basement, and had the dazed look of someone unused to full sunlight.
Like all good enterprisey development organizations, Jerod’s has an Enterprise Architecture Group that’s responsible for maintaining the Enterprise Framework. And like all good enterprise frameworks, Jerod’s is several dozen megabytes chock full of helper classes like IEnterpriseAuthenticationProviderFactoryManagementFactory.
Jerod does his best to avoid using the Enterprise Framework, but sometimes enterprise happens and he has no choice but to include it. Usually, it’s not that big of a deal, but when he was tasked with building a Windows client application that would be frequently deployed to mobile employees over a VPN over a cell-phone data connection, he needed to find a way to trim the size of the framework.
Dec 10
