Forums
"Let me guess" started Justin with a wry smile, "Mr. Van Halen is on 'strike' because he found a brown M&M, right?"
With a beleaguered look, Brian glared back over the rim of his glasses "If only - check your email."
Jeff was excited by his new project. His company wanted to add an ASP.NET interface to the same database used by one of their Windows Forms applications. For this company, "application integration" meant that two programs looked at the same database. Any change to a database and every application using it had to be updated, individually.
Since Jeff's first day at the company, he had been frustrated by the lack of code reuse, and this was a text-book example of where code reuse should work. He could grab the Windows team's DAL and business layer, slap a web front end, get the project done in a fraction of the time allotted for it, and make sure future maintenance helped both applications. Optimistically, it could be a model for future applications in his company.
Greg bought the promises of the startup. They wanted him to step in and take a mentoring role on a cutting edge, object oriented, SaaS project that was promised to be "a game changer". There would be stock options, a friendly workplace, and a savvy CEO that was deeply involved in the design process. Despite the buzzword-bingo, it sounded promising, and the interviews went well.
The small office was laid out like a Starbucks, complete with eye-strain inducing dim lighting. The core developers sat around a long table, clacking away at their laptops and cracking in-jokes over coffee. It was very chummy, and Greg wasn't part of the crowd yet; they'd need to sniff each other's posteriors and decide who was the alpha in this pack.
It's that time again! Please take a moment to check out the companies that sponsor us. Without them, there'd be no Daily WTF.
TDWTF Sponsors
BuildMaster - an easy way to automate your build, deploy, and configuration process all the way through production. Basically, it's application lifecycle management the way it should be: platform neutral, process neutral, and tool neutral. Comic Reader Mobi - a mobile comic book reader for iPhone/Windows/Blackberry with smarts; the app can automatically detect the size of the text bubble and magnify only that text without needing to zoom in and out. 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) MindFusion - a great source for flow-charting and diagramming components for a variety of platforms including .NET, WPF, ActiveX and Swing 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. 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. StrataScale - their world-class Data Center is engineered to provide 99.999% availability of power, cooling, and network connectivity, and has N+2 redundancy. That's some serious business.
In the late nineties, Eric started on his journey from being an engineer to being a programmer.
As part of the transition, Eric was assigned to work on an application that he and many of his fellow engineers were very familiar with - a program that created thermodynamic models used to design heat exchangers. Born and raised completely in-house, it was used in the design process of all of their company's products.
A couple months ago, I got an email from Daniel Magliola asking me if I’d like Hear a Blog to narrate The Daily WTF. I almost immediately replied “no thanks”, thinking that the last thing anyone wanted was TDWTF’s articles read by some Cylon-sounding program. But to my surprise, they don’t use text-to-speech software; they use real, professional narrators. Go ahead, give it a listen.
With Zach's technical knowledge and an excellent track record of handling large projects within the corporation, it was of little surprise when he received the task of estimating the amount of effort to create, in-house, the company's new web portal.
You see, in Zach's workplace, whenever an outside vendor was being considered to develop any in-house app, a "second opinion" would be obtained to see what it would cost to perform the same task using the company's existing available resources. The reasoning was simple - whichever side was the cheapest go the task.
Peter watched the Newton's Cradle clack away on his desk while contemplating this most recent problem. HR had just handed him a resume for a C# developer named Bobbie. The resume was stellar, her references glowing, And thanks to the negotiations with the placement company, she could start on Monday. Bobbie wasn't just qualified, she was over-qualified. She could do Peter's job in a snap.
He tossed the resume in the trash and stepped out into the row of cubes dedicated to his small staff. "Hey guys, circle up," he said. His three staff shuffled to their cube entrances and stared blankly in his general direction. "This tardiness problem is getting out of hand. The day starts at 8AM, not 8:05. And don't think I haven't noticed the long lunches. If this keeps up, there may have to be some changes around here."
Apr 10
