The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Irregular Regular Expressions

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2013-04-30

Marcus A. worked for a man who believed that regular expressions were the be-all end-all and could be used to trivially solve every data problem that could possibly arise. Their code base was riddled with regular expression transformations that would reduce most developers to tears. This manager also believed that anything that could be explained could be implemented more cheaply offshore.

Their main application contained a raw text field that held comments by customers. Someone got the idea that these comments could be mined and used for business purposes. However, to do this in a free format text field, the non-standardized words and phrases used by humans would need to be cajoled into something that was more easily processed. To this end, Marcus was tasked with managing an outsourced effort to standardize this data. The input would be a Customer Data table with a comments column. The output would be the same column, but with abbreviations, acronyms, etc. converted to standardized text.

111 comments - Last comment @ 2013-07-25

Nine Ways to Tuesday

by snoofle in CodeSOD on 2013-04-16

Devan L. was playing with his young daughter, when she asked him if he knew all of the days of the week. He replied: Sunday, Monday, Frogday, Flubberday, ...

She quickly admonished him for being silly. He told her that he was a very busy man and that there were too many days to remember. They laughed.

108 comments - Last comment @ 2013-04-28

Technically Competent != Qualified

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2013-04-02

When I interview people, part of my observations include whether they can be understood, and whether they can understand me. After all, a huge part of working with someone, anyone, is communication; if you can't communicate with a person, you and that person are not going to be able to work effectively together.

We've all had to deal with programmers who came to our teams from foreign lands where languages other than our own are spoken. With some effort, one can learn to understand these folks, even through their sometimes heavy accents. However, it is required that they can understand and communicate in the language that we speak.

134 comments - Last comment @ 2013-04-30