Recent Feature Articles

Sep 2010

Internal Standards

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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

The Discothèque Option and More Support Stories

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The Discothèque Option (from Tony Kollias)
Working in Europe, where English is often a second language, we often get some interesting support calls. One of my favorite is from a few years back, where a user was having a problem with her internet connection dropping every few minutes.

After spending a good fifteen minutes diagnosing and checking things on my end, I was unable to see anything that would have caused the problem. Even the logfiles – which detail unexpected connection drops – were clean. Nothing seemed to be the problem.

191 comments - Last comment @ 2017-11-11

Hack School

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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

The Test Machine

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The Test Machine seemed a bit out of place as it sat there, nestled between cubicles in Christophe’s office. Actually, calling it a “test machine” seemed a bit inappropriate, too, much like calling an aircraft carrier a boat, or referring to a house mover as simply a truck. It was huge – no less than seven feet tall, four feet wide, and three feet deep – and weighed a solid ton or two. This marvelous machine was as modern as it was massive, sporting several state-of-the-art computers, power supplies, instruments, relays, ignition coils, fuel injectors, and everything else one might need to test automotive electronic control units (ECUs).

In those days, ECUs were becoming exponentially more complex with the integration of microprocessors, real-time processing, and communication between other ECUs. And as a result, testing individual and networked ECUs was becoming exponentially more complex. Christophe’s company, however, promised a unique solution: software-driven automated testing to validate the virtually endless combinations and permutations of input conditions that exist while operating a vehicle.

198 comments - Last comment @ 2024-01-24

'Tis a Gift to be Simple

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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
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