The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Internal Standards

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2010-09-30

An internship always looks good on a resume. An internship with a Fortune 500 company looks even better. When Bonnie was offered such an internship at a major company's satellite office, she snatched the opportunity.

Matt, her mentor, tossed her as much development work as possible. Most of it was the scut work that the full-time developers didn't have time to do, but Bonnie had a lot of freedom to solve problems how she saw fit. One of her larger tasks was to add a few pages to an ASP.NET application handed down from the Corporate offices. Corporate wrote it, but the local office required some features it didn't have.

185 comments - Last comment @ 2017-01-18

Hack School

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2010-09-21

Daniel wasn't terribly surprised that the principal wanted to see him. After all, Daniel had dropped off a note with a link to the school's new website earlier that day. Principal Dauterive probably wanted to review it with him.

Dauterive glared at him from across the desk. "Daniel," he said sternly, "we need to talk about your recent hacking."

In the late 90s, the term "the Web" was just entering common usage. Daniel's rural Texas school district had strongly encouraged its schools to jump on this bandwagon.

205 comments - Last comment @ 2010-10-31

In a Barrel

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2010-09-16

Doug's PMO has begrudgingly agreed to move from the Waterfall model to Agile. They've been working through a project plan to make the transition, but unfortunately, it looks like they're still a long way off.

123 comments - Last comment @ 2010-09-27

'Tis a Gift to be Simple

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2010-09-07

Insurance is a complicated industry at the best of times. At one firm, it was made more complex by the Policy Entry system. A Third Party Administrator(TPA) negotiated a policy with a client, then documented the changes in a rather hefty spreadsheet. The TPA would then call the data entry clerk at Bells-Torgo Insurance and verbally relate the contents of the spreadsheet.

Corey did the rational thing and suggested, "Hey, maybe we can automate this!" It was a straightforward operation, with a clear and well understood mapping between the TPA's sheet and the Policy database. Corey wrote up a design document, which included a diagram to sum the entire thing up in a way a manager could understand.

148 comments - Last comment @ 2011-10-21