Recent Feature Articles

Dec 2014

Classic WTF - Line by Line

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To close out the year, enjoy one of our popular articles from 2014. Happy holidays!

In the bowels of a business unit, a director got a great deal on a third party software package. He bought it, without talking to corporate IT, and then was upset when it couldn’t gracefully integrate with any of the corporate IT assets. Eager to throw good money after bad, the director hired his nephew’s consultancy to build an integration tool to make his new toy work.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2014-12-30

It's Raining on the Robot

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It's Raining on the Robot

On the way to the data vault, Dave and his coworkers tried to list every rain-related song they knew. Here Comes The Rain Again was an easy one. Ryan, raised in the nineties, offered I'm Only Happy When It Rains. Justine tried to get out in front of the competition by rapid-firing November, Purple, and No. Thad, veteran of a hundred karaoke battles, offered Blame It On The Rain.

But none of them had heard It's Raining On The Robot before.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2014-12-22

Pass By NullPointer

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Maxime was having difficulty viewing a website with the NoScript add-on installed to her web browser. It wasn't a huge surprise - some websites just don't work right with NoScript running, but it was a surprise when her browser displayed Java exceptions. Enabling JavaScript made the error page go away, but what? Lack of JavaScript causing Java exceptions!?

She viewed the page source and found that the server expects an "innerCHK" parameter, perhaps some kind of session or security token, to be passed in via URL query string. If it isn't provided, the server returns an error page displaying a java.lang.NullPointerException. Fortunately the front-end developers concocted this brillant snippet of JavaScript to resolve this issue:

79 comments - Last comment @ 2014-12-18

Woulda...Coulda...Shoulda

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Have you ever done something that seemed like a good idea at the time? Then looked back upon it much later and had second and third thoughts about the wisdom of what you had done?

A long time ago, Jack worked for a company that had built a goods-declarations system for freight-forwarders so that they could get the blessing of the government to import/export their goods.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2014-12-15

The Membrain

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Michael was annoyed. Their in-house package manager- software that everyone needed to do their jobs- was complaining about a missing file that had just existed a second ago.

No big deal. First step: close the program, then re-open.

Cell membrane drawing-en
199 comments - Last comment @ 2015-01-13

The Robot Guys

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Business was booming during the formative years of SuperbServices, Inc. It was a blessing and a curse; like any startup, there was more work to do than people to do it. Telling the sales team to be less successful wasn’t an option, so the tech team had to adapt.

The CEO of SuperbServices tasked Roland with a major initiative that would save the company, or at least their sanity. “We need to automate all of this processing work, so we can focus on service delivery!”, the CEO said. “Our value proposition is our services, and everything else is busy work. We need to automate that, and that’s where you come in. I need you to engage the Robot Guys to work on automating everything: operations approvals, purchasing, money transfers, client emails, everything!”

60 comments - Last comment @ 2017-02-28
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