• gendo5150 (unregistered)

    Maybe the story is true. Maybe the Tom's name in real life is Lennart, Lennart Poettering.

  • irisp (unregistered)

    JDSL this is something new, I only knew about JSON. very nice article and want to share http://jsonformatter.org for json lovers.

  • Stan (unregistered)

    Here's old fairy tale about morons such as Tom and VP:

    Master of All Masters , (Joseph Jacobs) http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type1562a.html#england

  • Carlos (unregistered) in reply to divVerent

    Ya, cuz of Tom!

  • TenshiNo (unregistered) in reply to cheong

    It's completely reasonable to assume that checking in a comment to source control is not going to cause an instant catastrophe in production. Whoever decided that there would be only one code branch, and that development would occur in the branch that production ran off of is the one who deserves to be fired. That is just asking for catastrophic failure at some point.

  • (nodebb)

    The comments were in the JS, not the JSON.

  • (nodebb)

    I'm logged in. Why do I still have to prove I'm not a robot? Can't I just promise not to let any robots use my account, and leave it at that?

  • (nodebb)

    ...and don't bother replying to that, because it's not going to send me an email and in all likelihood I'll never come back and see your reply.

  • Visitor101 (unregistered)

    Forgive me if this is a n00b mistake, but isn't the Puppet R10K system built on the same premise? If so, I'd like to feel justified in hating that thing.

    https://docs.puppet.com/pe/latest/r10k.html

  • Cockleberry Finn (unregistered)

    Reading the article made me appreciate how my boss calls this.rekt() on my commits whenever they seem overly convoluted. Sure, it may hurt my feefees to discover in the git log that my brainchild got reverted overnight, but the price I pay in hurt pride keeps me from going full Tom.

  • Paul (unregistered) in reply to Quite

    More like he cleaned the toilet and there mere act of flushing it caused the water supply to explode.

  • James (unregistered) in reply to irisp

    https://jsonformatter.org/json-pretty-print this is also good.

  • Guy (unregistered)

    I saw someone use that "or I'll quit" language and management said, "We appreciate what you've done for us and wish you the best". Oops!

  • TheWurst (unregistered)

    Tom is clever. The company will never fire him and he can demand whatever he wants. If he wants more salary, he just needs to threaten the company that he will quit and the company will comply.

  • nebulaWolf (unregistered)
    Comment held for moderation.
  • Z (unregistered)
    Comment held for moderation.
  • Tedd Arcuri (unregistered)

    tom is a genius

  • Alex (unregistered) in reply to Tedd Arcuri

    Yeah Tom is real Genius. Should've known Comments dont work yet

  • A Coder (unregistered)

    Tom's a genius

  • Alex (unregistered)
    Comment held for moderation.
  • Bog (unregistered)

    Tom is a effin engineer

  • Tom (unregistered)
    Comment held for moderation.
  • Tom (unregistered)
    Comment held for moderation.
  • Fa Caldo (unregistered)

    I am in the unfortunate position of working with Tom.

    Well not Tom himself, a Tom-like colleague, revered by upper management who built something very, very similar to this.

    You see, in the environment I'm working in right now, every time you go live with a change it takes countless steps to get it approved (despite having no unit tests, or any test at all).

    So what did he do? He wrote an abstraction layer that interprets a JSON file that contains what input to expect, how to interpret it, and what functions to apply to each field to get an output.

    "This way I'm not touching the code. I'm just touching JSON files"

  • Sneed (unregistered)

    Legendary article, made all the funnier by the fact I now sort of work with a Tom who is also actually called Tom. In fairness, the weird tech stack in this case isn't fundamental company infrastructure and is just a proprietary database (which is actually good) and its associated software (which I personally despise but I know some people like it).

    It's almost sad how believable this is, that the industry would actually contain software like this and that someone could actually conceive of the horrors. Maybe some day I'll be bored enough to attempt to make JDSL a reality and make the world a worse place.

  • OMGWTF (unregistered) in reply to Sneed

    It's been years since the last OMGWTF contest, but I guess the contest isn't ever really over.

  • Jay Diesel (unregistered)

    Tom is a super-genius!

  • Radomir, The sad developer (unregistered)

    Until today, I lived in blissful unawareness. I thought the worst thing there was were functions saved in database records as strings, just waiting to be eval'ed and kick you in the bazingas. My innocence was shattered by this article, and I will never be the same person again.

    I agree with one thing: Tom was a genius. He had to be. It takes a genius to sell something like that to your company, make it sell it to customers who pay actual, real, hard-earned money for it, become known as a genius and a virtuoso, and still feel good about yourself. I salute Tom. He achieved a level of developer-beingness unobtainable to us mortals.

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