Recent Articles

May 2015

It's a Kinda Magic

by in Error'd on

"One of the UK's leading motoring organizations needs a little help in wand waving on its route planning web site," Cameron wrote.

39 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-25

Meeting Halfway

by in The Daily WTF: Live on

On April 10th, I hosted The Daily WTF: Live! in Pittsburgh. It was a blast. We had a great crowd, and some great performances.

John Lange attended the storytelling workshop I co-taught with Kevin Allison, of The Story Studio. His story- about gaming, and friendship, and technology- really struck a chord with me, and I wanted to make sure he got a chance to share it.

8 comments - Last comment @ 2015-05-28

Reversing the String, Belaboring the Point

by in CodeSOD on

Laser module

The position had sat open for months now; the department was straining under the load of too many projects and too few developers, but the pool of candidates was rapidly shrinking. So when Cindy found a resume that looked halfway decent, she immediately recommended tossing them a programming test and scheduling an interview.

79 comments - Last comment @ 2015-05-29

Take A Bold

by in Feature Articles on

RTFM coffee mug

“Hello!” A perky voice chirped over Evan’s shoulder. “May I come in?”

123 comments - Last comment @ 2024-07-23

A Winning Strategy

by in CodeSOD on

“Hey,” Roberto said while pairing with an offshore programmer, “this problem would be easier to solve with the Factory pattern.”

“What’s that?”

19 comments - Last comment @ 2015-05-26

Tell QA They Missed One

by in Error'd on

"You know, I've always wanted some sideways text that says 'not for sale'," writes Julie, "Too bad I'll never know."

39 comments - Last comment @ 2015-05-25

Sea of SQL

by in CodeSOD on

Andy writes: “Operations reported that a query was taking a long time.  Even the 'developers' of this query didn't know why it was taking a long time.”

I tell ya, folks… some submissions, you just set down and back away slowly… then hunt up a magnifying glass and a bottle of aspirin.

79 comments - Last comment @ 2015-05-26

Like a Well-Oiled Machine

by in Feature Articles on

It was Housekeeping Sunday in Dirk’s small IT shop, which usually meant taking their diminutive lot of servers down for routine maintenance. Dirk thought he’d change it up this week and add some actual cleaning to their housekeeping tasks. He knew just the man for the job too - Andrew, the Big Boss’s nephew.
Andrew couldn’t be trusted with much, but he was assigned to work with Dirk on this Housekeeping Sunday so he would have to be assigned a task he couldn’t possibly screw up. Several of the servers hadn’t been physically cleaned in a while and their dust bunnies had evolved in to full-blown Killer Rabbits of Caerbannog.

219 comments - Last comment @ 2015-06-04

Recruiting Desperation

by in CodeSOD on

When hiring programmers, recruiters will often try to be “clever”. Sometimes, this results in a memorable trick, like EA Canada’s job posting billboard.

EA Canada billboard which reads: char msg = {78,111,119,32,72,105,114,105,110,103,0};

59 comments - Last comment @ 2015-05-20

Pizza Hacker

by in Feature Articles on

...and at 10PM, see if the investigators can track a killer who hacks an online game and tricks children into delivering illegal weapons on the next episode of...

239 comments - Last comment @ 2015-06-05

BSOD Could Go All the Way This Year

by in Error'd on

"Yes! I'm a huge fan of BSOD. I'm glad to see SportsCenter giving some well deserved recognition!," Mike writes.

59 comments - Last comment @ 2015-05-16

Happy Little (Read-Only) Trees

by in CodeSOD on

Blossoming tree - painting by László Mednyánszky

"Joey," asked Ross of the new contractor, in a slow, careful voice, as though trying to calm a large predator. "Explain to me why the data tree has this read-only flag?"

59 comments - Last comment @ 2015-05-26

Fired Up

by in The Daily WTF: Live on

On April 10th, I hosted The Daily WTF: Live! in Pittsburgh. It was a blast. We had a great crowd, and some great performances.

You know him as the master of the Errords, the king of the CodeSODs, the Dev-Master of the Dev-Disaster, Mark Bowytz. Once upon a time, though, he was just another lowly office drone like yourself. This is his origin story: the WTF that launched a thousand head-desks.

0 comments - Last comment @ -none-

The Bureaucracy is Expanding…

by in Feature Articles on

Government Department prided itself on the precision of its process and procedures. Every function in the organization had its functionary, at least in theory. Joe had only been on the job a month when he discovered that figuring out which functionary would actually function wasn’t as easy as it looked. The Department used a database known as CAS to track all its financial data, including wages and work orders. Since Joe intended to earn wages in return for coordinating those work orders, he was going to need access to CAS. His first inkling that there might be a problem with the pervasive process was that, despite all employees needing at least basic CAS access for the payroll system, it wasn’t until his fourth week with the department that Terry, his team lead, gave him the good news.

59 comments - Last comment @ 2015-05-14

And I Try, and I Try

by in CodeSOD on

“If you want to put everything under test, you have to write code like this.”

At least, that’s what Alex’s co-worker said to him, when Alex demanded an explanation for this block of code.

82 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-06

You're Welcome...?

by in Error'd on

"I clicked 'Yes' when asked if I wanted to send a report of VLC's crash, but apparently my attempted cooperation wasn't really appreciated," David K. writes.

59 comments - Last comment @ 2015-05-12

Help Us Back Programming Languages ABC++

by in Announcements on

TLDR; I have another Kickstarter Project, this time it's a kids book about programming!

79 comments - Last comment @ 2015-05-12

The Forest of Trees

by in CodeSOD on

Sally’s co-worker wanted to turn some data into HTML. It would flow from his application into client-side JavaScript which would build the DOM. He decided that it made sense to use a tree to represent the data as it’s translated.

The C# declaration of his tree looked something like this:

44 comments - Last comment @ 2022-06-08

The Life and Death of Steel City Ruby Con

by in The Daily WTF: Live on

On April 10th, I hosted The Daily WTF: Live! in Pittsburgh. It was a blast. We had a great crowd, and some great performances.

Today's installment investigates exactly how a conference comes into being, told from the inside of Steel City Ruby Con.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2015-05-06

Version Logging

by in CodeSOD on

251220061158 (335194668)

When a system evolves and grows, it's usually necessary to identify various versions of software living in the wild. There are many ways to do that: some hide their version numbers in code, some keep them in configuration and metadata files, and others store them in the application's database.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2015-05-06

More is Better, They Said

by in Feature Articles on

Steve’s group was quite good,
they made quality software.
Then came Initech.

Initech bought them,
management had a field day
restructuring teams.

40 comments - Last comment @ 2017-07-29

Used Shellfish

by in Error'd on

"According to channel 7 in Australia these guys are right into trawling for content," Martin.

1 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-23
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