The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The A(nti)-Team

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2015-03-24

In the 1980’s, there was a TV show called The A-Team. There was the scrounger, who could scam anyone out of anything. He would make promises that were sort of true to get what he wanted (sound like marketing?) There was the tough guy who could intimidate anyone into doing anything. He knew how to get things done, but underneath it all, was a nice guy. There was the leader, who could always come up with a plan to save the day. And there was the one guy who was a little crazy (the good kind of crazy), but who you could count on in a pinch. There was also the occasional outside helper who would run interference and recon. This was a group of folks who worked as a well-oiled machine to get the job done. Failure was not an option! They were a team!

The A-Team never filed a project methodology document. No wonder they were wanted criminals.

Alex had taken a job on a new greenfield development effort to replace an aging and unsupportable birds-nest-o-wtf™. Naturally, the position was advertised as “we intend to do things right!” The project is fully funded. We will have the proper equipment and team personnel to get this job done. We have the full support of six layers of management plus all of the users. Alex was optimistic.

Dynamic Tables

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2015-03-17

We've all learned to write programs a bit more generically than the immediate problem requires. We use interfaces in our code and include concrete implementation classes via some language-appropriate mechanism. We use factories to produce the object we want, rather than hard code them. We use code generators to spew forth mountains of code from configurable templates. Sometimes, we even generate SQL on-the-fly. It provides more flexibility that way; instead of having to write a separate query for every permutation of question, we can write something that can dynamically create the query, execute it and return the results.

At Initech, Ian was assigned an interesting JIRA ticket: Investigate errors regarding column length. Since that was all the information written in the ticket, Ian hunted down the author of the ticket to pry out a tad more information. Apparently, the part of Initech's intranet website that was used by the sales agents was suddenly throwing errors about some kind of maximum-size error, and he needed to find out what it was, why it was happening and how to fix it.