- Feature Articles
- CodeSOD
- Error'd
-
Forums
-
Other Articles
- Random Article
- Alex's Soapbox
- Announcements
- Best of…
- Best of Email
- Best of the Sidebar
- Bring Your Own Code
- Coded Smorgasbord
- Mandatory Fun Day
- Off Topic
- Representative Line
- News Roundup
- Editor's Soapbox
- Software on the Rocks
- Souvenir Potpourri
- Sponsor Post
- Tales from the Interview
- The Daily WTF: Live
- Virtudyne
Admin
The frist RWTF: "so most of her projects were pretty routine enterprise-level things" Routine - enterprise-level an oxymoronic juxtaposition.
Admin
Was it really necessary to shoehorn ice and fire in there?
Admin
When I head "hook up X to Y" I get the shivers and go to my happy place, because it usually isn't just hooking up X to Y, but also inventing the damn hook. X is a arc welder and Y is a dragon's ass. Go!
Admin
De-George R. R. Martin'd:
Emily worked for a health insurance company. She was given a minor role on a large project. The project's aim was to centralize the contact information from several different systems.
Emily's role was retrieving information from the email provider. However its API was poorly developed and not well documented. It used XML but did not conform to SOAP and did not use a RESTful paradigm.
Emily eventually discovered an API for querying the SQL directly. She looked at the example query and stopped as far as:
<LEFT_PARENS><LEFT_PAREN>(</LEFT_PAREN></LEFT_PARENS>
Emily continued her work and came across the batch API. After gaining access by obtaining a developer key and providing her email address she was finally able to retrieve the information she needed albeit in massive XML files. She wrote a shim to receive them via SFTP daily and developed a REST API to allow the rest of the team to query the data. Satisfied with her work she moved onto the next project.
Years later while working on yet another project, Emily received a furious email. The reports from the original project were clogging up the system and impact business functions. Unsure as to why she was being emailed Emily looked at the reports and found that the daily process had executed 6000 times in the past 4 days, with 4000 more pending executions in the queue.
Further investigation found that the current devs were still using her developer key in the test environment. Furthermore, they'd been having a problem so had hooked the test environment up to the production server and increased the frequency at which the export task ran to 30 seconds in order to look for a sporadic issue. Emily had to manually cancel and delete 10000 batch requests to clear the queue. Finally, she removed her developer key.
Admin
When you play the game of email providers, no one wins.
Admin
The Real WTF was me trying to even read this article. Forcing in some George RRRRRR Martin into a story for the sake of doing it is the real WTF. Can we get back to stories without some of this? It doesn't need it. It adds nothing of value to the story. It's empty calories
Admin
The Real WTF was me trying to even read this article. Forcing in some George RRRRRR Martin into a story for the sake of doing it is the real WTF. Can we get back to stories without some of this? It doesn't need it. It adds nothing of value to the story. It's empty calories
Admin
Sorry you are disappointed with the writing t0pC0der. I think the willingness of the editors here to play with modes of expression is one of the things that makes it interesting. Yes, you can make the stories here as dry as a technical manual or as compelling as the derivation of the quadratic formula but I think the point is that they are trying to entertain us. If today doesn't meet your standards for entertainment tune in tomorrow and maybe that story will be fun for you. I personally enjoyed the story - YMMV.
Admin
I didn't find this creative. The 4th of July post was creative; this is just a failskin produced by attaching names to things in a barely cohesive manner.
Admin
Another RWTF is that here's a George R.R. Martin story -- but nobody got killed.
Admin
I hate this stupid website. I hate this stupid website! I HATE THIS STUPID WEBSITE!!
I didn't even read the article but I already knew everything I needed to know about this stupid article - it's written by a stupid tryhard BLOWHEAD who doesn't understand the nuances of technical diversity! It's like a 2 year old got a hold of pablo picasso's famous artwork and decided "HEY IM GOING TO ADD MY OWN VARIETY TO IT" without considering the ethical implications of transpositioning of the variable interfluxaries! Who in the HELL edited this article? A gorilla? Cliff Bezinsky? SERIOUSLY IS THERE NO QUALITY CONTROL FOR THIS WEBSITE!
...
it's time... time to get edgy.
. . . . . .
FUK DIS FUK DAT FUK JABBA FUK ORACLE FUK MY-CRO-SOFT FUK HAPPINESS AND SUNSHINE AND FLOWERS THEYRE ALL FAKE ONLY THING AWAIT IS BLACK__DARKNESS IN ABYSS OF LIFE AND THEN SORROW MERICLESS END?? FUK STEEM FUK EA FUK BLIZZARD FUK RIOT THEY BANNED ME FOR BEING TOXIC ILL GIVE U TOXIC [FARTS INTENSIFY] I HATE EVERYTHING I HATE EVERYTHING I HATE EVERYTHING
FUK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Admin
I thought today's tech horror story would have blended better with The Lord of the Rings, but I'm not complaining because it was 100% free entertainment and, as usual, I didn't grasp the tech aspect whatsoever anyway.
Admin
And that kids, is why you Don't Smoke Crack...
Admin
The tech aspects are as such:
First, imagine that the service was as labyrinthine and onerous to use as the most hyperbolic rendition of a DMV in a sitcom, or stand-up routine. Everything filled out an triplicate, no clear rhyme or reason, and you never know where (or why) you're supposed to go next.
Then, our heroine finds a hotline that allows her to do everything she wants, but in order to use it you have to tell them who you are, and then punch in a PIN, before you can start doing business. She sets this up, and a department goes about managing the task.
Much later, some people start yelling at her because there is a bonkers-level amount of communication going on to the hotline, so when she goes and checks it out, she discovers that (a) they have everyone in the department calling the hotline nonstop, and that's all they have on their to-do lists for the rest of the week, and (b) they're all still pretending to be her. So, she calmly explained to them that they didn't need to call with that level of frequency, as it was in fact quite insane to do so, and then she took away her PIN, so when the department called in, it wasn't tied to her anymore.
The story kind of alludes to her not generating a new PIN for the department to use, either, 'cause hey, they need to know how to do it themselves!
Admin
I wonder if the writer is aware that there is also an Aegon that's a sizeable insurance company?
Admin
Well, that digest was better than the usual unexplained block of javascript or ruby they give us to laugh at, but I did have my heart set on Lord of the Rings... :D
Admin
Nothing says Pain like integrating with the Quickbooks / Pastel API
Admin
Given, that most of the time the most vocal people are those who are disappointed I'll throw my 2c here as a counterbalance: I like it.
Admin
Too many references from Game of Thrones!
Admin
Please stop trying to write fictional stories. It's not your thing.
Admin
Having interfaced with the same email service provider, I can attest to the horribleness of their APIs.
That said, the fact that most big companies have horrendous APIs is further proof that rock solid, high quality APIs and code (and coders) is not a prerequisite to financial success. It is really hard for "top" developers using "the best" language, architecture, and tools to understand that mega-social networks built on a mishmash of PHP and duct tape are worth 1 billion times more than their perfectly architected, properly tested, high quality, unused, perfection. Get over yourselves people, users and investors don't care about your gold plated works of art. They only care about outcome.