Recent Feature Articles

Nov 2014

Classic WTF - The Defect Black Market

by in Feature Articles on

For us, the day after Thanksgiving is typically known as "Black Friday". There is nothing sinister about it - oh no - just lots and lots of opportunities to go shopping and save cash along the way and take businesses from the "red" (loss) to black (profit!). This reminded me of an article from July 2012 that I'm positive that you'll enjoy.


When Damon's coworker stopped by his cubicle for a chat, Damon wondered if they should have met in a dark alley somewhere. Damon, a developer, and his coworker in quality assurance were meeting to trade bugs on the newly created Defect Black Market.


What a SAP

by in Feature Articles on

On day one of the project, Kenneth was given a single rule that was to be followed under all circumstances. “You do not talk to the SAP contractors. They’re too busy, and their time is too valuable. They do not have time for front-end developers.”

As a front-end dev, Kenneth was used to being told to take his crayons and get back to work. A front-end dev forbidden from talking to the developers behind the back-end? What could go wrong.
Gift box icon
What’s in the box? And why does it smell so bad?

The product was a “redeem points for cool products” system. A customer could purchase a gift-box. The outside of the box was labeled with a public code, and the inside was labeled with a private code. A user could enter both codes into the system to redeem points. Those points could then be used to buy tchotchkes from their web store.


The 8K Bug

by in Feature Articles on

The scene: late Friday afternoon, a medium-size company in a big-size panic. Tom and the other web developers churned through last-minute fixes on a client’s new e-commerce site- a site that should’ve been done and deployed two weeks earlier.

Cromemco 8K Bytesaver (1976)

Tom committed his latest changes on a CSS file to the SVN repository, wiping sweat from his brow. He updated his local repository, then went back to Dreamweaver, shaking his head. The company’s web designers insisted the devs used Dreamweaver. It wasn’t that bad, Tom supposed, but there were several better-


Citizen Blaine (Pt 2)

by in Feature Articles on

Citizen Blaine is the story of one genius developer’s career. Last time, we saw the start of his arc of success. He started by accomplishing the seemingly impossible, and moved on to design the impossible system.
We last left Rich, the desparate developer on a deadline, trying to trace the mystery of Blaine’s last word- “Rosebud”. His search brought him to Dave, the salty and rude developer who maintains SLED, part of Blaine’s legacy.

“So, Blaine leaves the SLED team to go start his supply-chain crapfest, right?” Dave said. “And allllll of the problems with SLED are somebody else’s fault.” Dave’s eyes picked up an evil gleam as he turned to Rich. “He was home free… until Franz came in.”

SLEDding Uphill


Citizen Blaine

by in Feature Articles on

Rich had a five-alarm project. Six months ago, the legal department became aware that government regulations on labeling would change. That information slowly ground its way through the intestines of the company, until a pile of poorly documented, barely specified changes landed on Rich’s desk. If he didn’t implement those changes in the next 48 hours, a half-million units of commodity chemicals were about to pour out of a processing plant and be illegal to ship.

The problem was confounded by the nature of the labeling system. It was tied into a home-grown, supply-chain management system. Theoretically, it was a one-stop shop for everything- formulations, MSDSes. In reality, it was a complicated thicket of unrelated applications which dragged data around between various silos, and usually crashed in the process. Rich had no idea what this change was going to involve. Only one person, the head of the Supply-Chain IT team, could point him in the right direction: Blaine.
Rosebud, the sled
Blaine’s office was normally crammed with the awards, trophies, and various “atta-boy” certificates which honored him for a job well done around the company. Today, the walls were bare, and all of those meaningless honors were piled up in a box on his desk. Blaine ignored Rich, and finished packing his box.


Serendipity

by in Feature Articles on

Given the title, most of you are expecting a story that goes as follows: Boy meets girl. Girl writes phone number inside a book in a used book store. Ten years pass and boy searches for book. Boy finds book and gets girl. But not this time. Instead, Andrew is the source of a story that ranks much higher on the believability scale.

Andrew's father worked for SmallishNicheCo where, like many small companies in the early 1990s, the sum total of IT knowledge was non-existent. Every problem and request was passed to an outsourced help desk, which in the tradition of solid customer service for which IT help desks have become renown, could take up to 3 days to acknowledge receipt much less dispatch a person to solve the problem. If you needed to have the brightness on your monitor adjusted, you were looking at 5-7 days. And that was after passing the gauntlet of questions to ensure the problem was 'real' (Is your computer plugged in? How about your monitor?)


Marketing Software

by in Feature Articles on

We've all dealt with marketing people who, in the very depths of their souls, believe that if they promise something to a customer, it will magically happen. Regardless of actual manpower, time or cost. It will work perfectly the first time, and every time, because they promised that it would. It will be cheaper than they expected because, let's face it, how hard could it be to build something, even if it's merely software...?

Hope and Dispair

Aargle interviewed with all of the developers and technical folks in his new department. They all seemed sane, grounded in reality and realistic about what was - and wasn't - doable.