Recent Feature Articles

Mar 2012

The Thank-You Change

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“Where’s the thank-you change?” read the entire contents of the email from Tycho’s boss. The blank subject line – one of the boss’s many trademarks – offered no help in decoding the message.

Had Tycho not had a solid two years of experiencing working for this man, he may have made the mistake of asking for some sort of clarification. Perhaps a pointer as to which of the dozen or so applications the thank-you change referred to. Or perhaps to which of the several dozen or so change requests this may have referred to. Or if the thank-you change even referred to a change request or application at all.

102 comments - Last comment @ 2012-04-02

Spammers Say the Darndest Things

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As those of you who run a blog — or really, any website with any form on it anywhere — know, spammers are unavoidable. Add a CAPTCHA and they’ll crack it. Add a really difficult CAPTCHA and they’ll just outsource it to CAPTCHA-solving sweatshops in Kerbleckistan. Add a spam filtering comment service and they’ll just figure out a way around it. All the while, users will become more and more frustrated at how difficult it is to share a simple comment.

Generally, the spammers post links to things like counterfeit designer boots and replica watches. Sometimes they’ll pull a few words out of the article and say “how I loved your writing about BOOL, it was a good point. I agree that FILE_NOT_FOUND is important! If you like this article, you should check out these discount kitten mittens.”

151 comments - Last comment @ 2021-07-11

Let Me Sleep on It

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"Perl is a language for getting your job done," is the underlying philosophy of the language. The only right way to write a Perl program is whatever way works. The ultimate flexibility of Perl is a breeding ground for WTFs . That's doubly true when you're new to the language, like Dave once was.

To get Dave started with Perl, his boss paired him up with Alvin, the veteran Perl programmer. He'd been using Perl since version 4, and had a reputation for wielding regexes like a scalpel. After Dave had a few days of ramp up, Alvin started sending him code from their codebase so that Dave could try and understand how their applications worked.

184 comments - Last comment @ 2022-12-17

Classic WTF: I've Got The Monkey Now

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I'll be at Code PaLOUsa today, so here's a fun classic from a little while back. I've Got The Monkey Now was originally published on February 5, 2008.

1999 was a big year for Harvard Business School Publishing. In the past few years, they had seen their business model – selling books, journals, articles, case studies, and so forth – transform from being entirely catalogue-based to largely web-based, and it had finally come time for a major re-launch of their website.

68 comments - Last comment @ 2017-12-28

The Strong Type

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"Null reference exception, what does that even mean?" Randy whined.

"You probably didn't initialize one of your variables," Bob said.

205 comments - Last comment @ 2016-12-03
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