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Let's say you were given the requirement "ensure that all five lines of a shipping address contains valid characters." How do you suppose you would go about implementing such a requirement? Let's hope your solution would be far, far away from Buri's coworker's implementation which not only has a separate function for each address but manages to have an astonishingly unique method of testing for bad characters ...
Christian’s first day at his new job started out just like many others in the professional IT world.
“Welcome aboard!” exclaimed Brian with an outstretched hand, “Great to see you again, c’mon in and we’ll get you all set up.”
Nearly six years ago, Brian J gave up being a software developer to start a career in law enforcement. He specifically avoided the world of high-tech cyber crime, and wanted to start life anew as your everyday suburban cop. Of course, with a computer engineering degree and several years of IT experience, technology challenges tend to follow him wherever he goes.
For being a suburb, Brian’s department is pretty big and has a wide variety of posts that range from patrol to accident investigation. In addition, certain officers are trained to do certain things, and others have a preference... especially against the few horrible posts – such as manning the speed trap – that just suck the life out of most people for eight hours. As a result, shifts and schedules change from night to night.
It's Christmas Eve here and, oh my, everywhere so we're taking the day off. Our hearts at TDWTF go out to you poor schmoes (all 5 of you) who are stuck having to work today.
A few kilometers left on Ruta Nacional 128, a brief stop at a control policial, a short trip down the unpaved Calle 33, and just like that, Sergio was at his destination. It was a top-secret Argentinean Government Facility.
After about six months of learning the ropes, and then actually getting good at the ropes, SJ decided that his job was pretty decent as far as tech support went.
Instead of just being some phone-drone for Initech support, SJ was the first line of defense. He spent his days filtering out the easy problems, passing the hard ones off to the system and network admins, and generally making sure Initech's customers (often sysadmins and developers themselves) got the solutions they needed. It was easy but meaningful work.
MRI scans, while neat, do leave something to be desired in the “fun” and “comfort” departments. After surrendering every sliver of metal and some percentage of clothing, the patient must sit or lie stock-still in a cold room for long stretches of time. As the giant magnets do their work, ear-splitting tones and rhythmic pulses fill the room. For those who lie down to enter the giant magnet-coffin, it’s easy to feel like the Frankenstein monster in some mad scientist’s German techno experiment.
The noise is so bad that most facilities issue earplugs to their patients- but some, as Evi relates, spring for $1,500 headsets, and $10,000 systems to play music through said headsets. Seem steep? No doubt the 1–3 year warranties, ranging from $1,500 to $3,500, raise eyebrows too- but it was well outside the warranty period that Evi learned the true extent of the fleecing.
In the 90s, if a continent-spanning national government wanted to communicate via a bulletin board system, they needed to code it themselves. And if they were going to invent the wheel, what language was better suited to the task than Visual Basic 2.0? Slap a pithy name on it- Chessboard and voila- instant success.
Daniel was the pawn tasked with protecting this particular king. In order to reduce network load, each site had their own copy of Chessboard, with their own security rules for access. Each had its own data-store, but users could browse to other sites, making it a truly “national” application. Most of the support issues were confusion caused by the neo-brutalist UI model used by Chessboard. To support the needlessly complex access rules, roughly 70% of the screens were dedicated to managing users in some way. There were at least twelve ways to ban a user from a given board, but no way to unban them.
Paul's first day at Redacted Commodities and Trading, LLC. started with a coffee and a muffin, and ended with trauma leave.
Bridget worked in a large R&D department for a software company. The main offices had long ago filled up, and R&D moved to a distant office building well away from the main campus. The building was less than ideal, especially if you listened to the network guys talk about pulling cable. It was old, it was dreary and the roof leaked, the furnace was wonky, and the kitchen had never actually gotten a hot-water line. Still, it was a place to work.
The fiscal year ended in September. When no budget appeared by October, the rumors started to fly. Worst case scenarios were bandied about. Eventually, the scuttlebutt got so deep that the R&D head, Greg, sent out a blast of emails telling everyone not to be concerned. Instead of mollifying the staff, the sheer volume of, “You have nothing to worry about,” messages made everyone worry.
Nov 12