Forums
In addition to being your intrepid editor, I’m an independent consultant. People hire consultants because they want someone to “inform their process”. “How do we do Agile better? Do we do Scrum or Kanban? Can we do scrumfall instead?” “Should we do BDD, TDD, or ATDD? Or combine them? Are there any other acronyms we should be doing?”
Ugh. This diagram makes me physically ill.
In these days of browser standards, it’s easy to forget that once upon a time, simple tasks like an HTTP request from JavaScript were difficult or even impossible, and if you wanted it to work in every browser, you were going to have to write wrappers to try and create a consistent API.
Zeke inherited an application back from those bad old days. It needs to poll a server, and based on the response, it performs an action, but it does this in an “inventive” way.
To introduce myself, that’s me over in the right corner. Hi. You might remember that, a year or so back, this site got a face lift. We still love the way it looks, but, if we are being straight with you, the CSS and HTML are a damn mess. So, I’ll be re-building the site while maintaining the same look, and maybe writing an article here and there.
Andrew performed corporate support for a giant multinational. One day, he was assigned what looked like a straightforward bug: a new Intranet webpage for one business unit was failing to accept CSV spreadsheets containing product information from another business unit.
"I don't know what it was trying to do, but it just couldn't do it," Bert writes, "It also looks like it couldn't finish the error message."
Sorting. It’s a well-studied class of problem, with a number of well-understood solutions. These days, pretty much any time you need to sort a collection, there’s a language-or-framework-provided function that handles it for you. Sure, a Better Idiot™ might try and implement their own sorting algorithm from scratch, but your Regular
Idiot™ just has to call .sort- it’s Idiot Proof™, right
Well, David S. found a better idiot.
Tim C. took pride in his work. He debugged Clockaburra, a timetabling and management suite, used in Australian high schools. Oftentimes, it was a simple problem that could be reproduced after a quick phone call from a client- usually a vice principal or the secretary. It’s when a bug can’t be reproduced that things get tricky, but Tim had the solution for that as well.
Loosely typed languages may offer certain advantages in terms of ease of use and flexibility, but they bring another challenge: it’s difficult to know what it is you’re looking at. With no compiler type checking, it’s hard to compare two things, and that becomes extremely problematic when you’re working with languages like, say, JavaScript.
Ruby, in its quest to “make programmers happy”, took a simplistic approach to the Truthy vs. Falsy problem. False is false. Nil is false. Everything else is True. Ruby is often used by web developers, who may be more comfortable in languages like JavaScript and PHP.
Management will frequently hire young developers just out of school because a) they're cheap, and b) a developer is a developer is a developer. Graduates, especially from advanced degree programs, always have more advanced training than those with lesser degrees, and should be able to bring advanced skills to the table on day-1. Sometimes management gets lucky, and with a bit of proper guidance and oversight, the newbie can create something reasonably functional, performant and maintainable. This is not one of those occasions.
In the aftermath of that strategy when management realizes that perhaps something is amiss and the usual threats of get it done don't seem to work, management crowbars open the purse strings and highly paid consultants are often sought after to clean up the mess. Sometimes the consultant can fix the mess. Sometimes the power of management to $*#%& up a project far outstrips anyone's ability to fix it.
"Believe it or not, I've actually seen less helpful content on StackOverflow," Luc F. writes.
It was a hot, cloudless summer day outside the headquarters of SmallTown SoftCorp. That didn’t matter much to Neil though, as he basked in the frosty air conditioning of the company’s modest, self-owned building. During the building’sconstruction, Neil oversaw the installation of everything from the demarc to the HVAC system. This made him feel like he had a hand in the arctic clime of the office.
Like many enterprise organizations, Martin’s workplace decided that they needed to build a collection of .NET assemblies which would be used in every application they built, and would provide important facilities like error handling.
And of course, not only would every application need to use these libraries, every application needed to make use of every component in them, otherwise why have the libraries at all? This meant that every Exception thrown by the application needed to inherit from the BaseException class:
Andrew M. worked at a small company in Kansas City called EtherTrode. With one facility and about 20 employees, they designed and built custom Ethernet hardware and drivers to fill niche roles where the common integrated chipsets weren’t good enough. Their hardware worked quite well, which attracted the attention of a multinational conglomerate called Initech. Initech puchased EtherTrode, rather than develop their own Ethernet devices.
.png)
Onboarding was complete, and Denise finally had her PC. Time for her first assignment!
Patrick wrote, "I was at Penn Station in NYC, and, well, I just had to say something!"
George G. came to the Pierce & Pierce office in good spirits and with high hopes. After finally gathering the courage to run away from his previous job, which had involved maintaining a million-line, 15-year-old mess of a codebase, he'd spent the last month interviewing with nearly every tech company in his area. Here he'd found his Promised Land: a modern-looking, professional company with a suite of cutting-edge technologies and, most importantly, a new and interesting project to which George would be assigned.
What feels like forever ago, we introduced the Lucky Deuce casino contest. This is a series of challenges, brought to you by our pals over at Infragistics, where we call on you to help us build a “scoundrel’s casino”.
Last week, we introduced our final challenge: take one of our casino games, add a betting system, and then build a strategy that lets you keep playing (by distributing the load across multiple accounts).
Deep in the wooded vales of red state America, December is hallowed not just for hunting presents, but also hunting deer. Lo, the season opened on a Friday. Clayton’s consulting firm declared it Camo Day in celebration.
It's a holiday in the US today, which means we're taking a 3-day weekend to dig back through the archives and find a classic WTF. One of my favorite features- one that we run far too rarely- are the true confessions. Sometimes, we are TRWTF, and let's applaud Matthew Schaad's story about his misuse of database triggers. - Remy
It started out as an average day for a developer like me. At 11:30AM, I was just getting into the office and fixing my second cup of coffee for the day. Being in the habit of coding till 3:00AM nightly, I was averaging about three to four cups a day. As I sat down at my desk to tackle one the several projects I had been assigned, I got a frantic call from the Director of IT, Jeremy.
"Canada? Yes! At least they got that one right!" Steve M. writes.
Software needs to run quickly. Whether it's to get a response to a shopper so they don't get bored and click on to the next site, or performing calculations on some data that is urgently needed downstream. Efficiency is important!
To that end, most developers attempt to write code that runs quickly. Sometimes, the code needs to run more quickly than conventional means will allow. In those cases, smart developers will figure out how to game the system to get the computer/network/disks/etc. to get things done more quickly than the usual methodologies permit. For example, you might try to cut network overhead by stuffing multiple small requests into one buffer to take advantage of the leftover space created by network packet sizes.
Today brings us the fifth and final entry about the Lucky Deuce. This is a series of challenges, brought to you by our pals over at Infragistics, where we call on you to help us build a “scoundrel’s casino”. Read to the end, because this week's challenge has a bigger prize- some TDWTF-emblazoned hoodies for the best entries.
Last week was your first shot at a “straight” solution, and the entries really showed it. Pretty much everybody got straight into the problem.
Aug 15
