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The Storray Engine was originally published on November 23, 2006
As an independent .NET consultant, Steve gets called in to help smaller development teams to transition to the platform. Several weeks ago, a client had asked him to help rebuild some of their "core technologies" in .NET so they could offer it as a service to their clients. The first "technology" they wanted to upgrade was something called the Storray Engine.
The Chief Development Manager was originally published on April 4, 2007.
"Wait a sec," whispered Chris’s coworker David, "he can’t possibly think this will solve the Build Problem? His idea is completely absurd!"
Merry Christmas! It Doubles as a Saw Horse was originally published on November 3, 2006.
A little more than a decade ago, John Rudd was a Computer Science student at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He worked closely with the university's IT department and played a vital role in the creation of a new state-of-the-art data center: he unplugged and labeled cables before the movers relocated the servers and plugged them back in at their new location. There was one thing that struck John as being a bit different: the data center wasn't fully built yet.
You get what you pay for. Ondra M didn’t use those exact words, but that’s effectively what told his friend and colleague, Derrick. “There’s a reason it costs one tenth as much to build in Kerbleckistan,” were Ondra’s exact words, “there’s not only the language barrier, but time zone differences, cultural diff—”
“It’s just code, which is just a bunch a bytes!” Derrick shot back, “who cares if it’s built here, there, or on the moon. I’ll just take the cost savings and put them towards advertising. ”
There are lots of ways to ruin a batch of steel.
Just like making a cake, add in too much of one ingredient, add an ingredient at the wrong time, or heat everything to the wrong temperature, and it could all end in disaster. But in the case of a steel mill, we're talking about a 150 ton cake made of red-hot molten iron that's worth millions of dollars. Obviously, the risk of messing things up is a little bit higher. So, to help keep potential financial disaster at bay, the plants remove part of the human error factor and rely upon automated systems to keep things humming along smoothly. Systems much like the ones made by the company where Robert M. was a development manager.
"Our database has a table called Year, and below are its contents" notes Suzy T "Want to guess which column is the primary key? You said 'ReferenceId', right? Bzzt, wrong! It's YearValue, of course. I feel like populating ReferenceId with dates from the 1970's just to see what happens. And lord help us in 2013... "
Between The Alliance / Bad Code Offsets, helping out the advertising team for Stack Overflow, the day job, and a new special project that Mark and I have taken on (to be announced soon), I have once again fallen behind on today's The Daily WTF article. But that's where I was hoping you might be able to help out.
The wonderfully bad stories and stupendously awful code shared on The Daily WTF comes from you, the consummate IT professionals who live them first hand. So please, share your stories. It can not only fun and cathartic, but other people actually learn from reading about these mistakes. And if you enjoy writing and would like to help Mark and I tell these stories, then let me know. I'd love to hear from you!
There was something that seemed a bit off kilter about Victor C’s new boss. He was a nice guy and all, but his social skills seemed to be somewhat lacking. There weren’t any glaring red flags, but Victor noticed a few things in the interview – nervous leg bouncing, awkward small talk, and a way-too-frequent throat-clearing – that weren’t exactly typical. Then again, it was Victor’s first real job, so he hardly had a frame of reference. Maybe all programmer-turned-CEO’s had a few quirks like that?
Although the company was relatively small (about twenty people in total), the pay was very reasonable and it was exactly the position that Victor was looking for a web developer with a tiny bit of network administration on the side. His first day was pretty normal as far as first days go — paperwork, acclimation, source code setup, etc — and he even got a friendly text message from John on his way home from work.
Please show your support for The Daily WTF by checking out the companies that have been kind enough to sponsor us. And, in doing so, I’m sure you’ll find some pretty cool products and services built by like-minded developers and IT professionals.
The Daily WTF Sponsors
Microsoft WebsiteSpark - a great program for web shops and freelance web developers and designers where you get some great software (Visual Studio Pro, SQL Server, Server 2008, etc), at no upfront cost for three years; it also provides support and resources to help grow business Rackspace Cloud - massively scalable hosting for .NET (2,3,3.5) PHP, Ruby, etc., with unlimited sites & mailboxes, simple online provisioning, and an enterprise clustered platform that's supported by real people. Peer 1 - provides award-winning Managed Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, Co-location, and Network services offered through 15 data center across North America. With over 10,000 businesses hosted on their legendary SuperNetwork™backbone, PEER 1 delivers one of the highest server performance and network outputs in the industry. MindFusion - a great source for flow-charting and diagramming components for a variety of platforms including .NET, WPF, ActiveX and Swing Software Verification - software engineering tools for memory leak detection, code coverage, performance profiling, thread lock contention analysis and thread deadlock detection, flow tracing and application replay on the Windows Vista, 2003, XP, 2000 and NT platforms. Atlassian - the folks behind JIRA (which, in turn inspired Manual JIRA) wanted to let you know that they're not a "follow the rules" software company who realizes that there is no single recipe for practicing agile development. They were once hungry for practical tips, so they thought they should share their agile story. SoftLayer - serious hosting provider with datacenters in three cities (Dallas, Seattle, DC) that has plans designed to scale from a single, dedicated server to your own virtual data center (complete with racks and all) SlickEdit - makers of that very-impressive code editor and some pretty neat Eclipse and VisualStudio.NET tools and add-ins, some of which (Gadgets) are free. Check out this short video highlighting just one of SlickEdit's Visual Studio integration features.
Two weeks ago, I announced the Bad Code Offsets project. It's a way to undo the bad code you other people have written without actually replacing the bad code. Much like carbon offsets, money used to buy Bad Code Offsets goes towards open-source projects which not only produce good code, but produce software that helps developers build good software.
And when I say the money goes towards these projects, I mean all of it. 100%. We pay for all expenses — PayPal fees, material costs, postage, etc. — out of pocket. But speaking of money, I’m happy to announce that we’ve raised $3,630.50 and are mailing out checks to the appropriate projects today.
Brad’s phone rang with the telltale tone of an inner-office call. “Yeah,” he briskly blurted out as he picked up the phone, “what’cha ya need?” That was actually his nice way of answering the phone. As the senior trader at Æxecor, one of the world’s largest energy trading companies, Brad didn’t need to impress anyone and, in his mind, displaying anything less than vicious hubris would be a sign of weakness.
“Err,” the receptionist nervously answered, “there’s a… err, delivery for you, sir. They—”
Nov 09
