When Vladimir first received his orders, the blood drained from his face. He was to take the legacy VB5 application, a system used daily by scores of users daily and uplift it to C++.
Things looked hopeless, however there was some good news! Vladimir had a department full of developers at his disposal and most of them had a hand in the creating and maintenance of the application.
Brad’s phone rang with the telltale tone of an inner-office call. “Yeah,” he briskly blurted out as he picked up the phone, “what’cha ya need?” That was actually his nicewayof answering the phone. As the senior trader at Æxecor, one of the world’s largest energy trading companies, Brad didn’t need to impress anyone and, in his mind, displaying anything less than vicious hubris would be a sign of weakness.
“Err,” the receptionist nervously answers, “there’s a… err, delivery for you, sir. They—”
"For reasons beyond my comprehension," Kristof writes, "one of my coworkers has managed to keep his job after more than eighteen months of messing about. His latest project was to build an import feature in the admin module of our web application. The idea behind the feature was that the administrators could upload a tab-delimited text file containing a list of products, and the application would insert or update the products in the database."
"Of course, the import feature required some pretty basic validation," Kristof continued. "Is it actually a text file? Is it tab delimited? Are the columns correct? And so on."
It's Black Friday! For those of you stuck at work (or not in the US), here's a fun classic. Smooth, Like a Factory was originally published on November 9th, 2006.
Daren S knew that his days were numbered. He was a troublemaker bent on changing The Way Things Were and The Director was hot on his tail. Though Daren worked discreetly, improving his coworkers' productivity a little bit at a time, it only was inevitable that The Director would eventually find out. One does not become The Director by letting such things slide.
Some time ago when Michael was tasked with updating some of code on an old website, one file on the server caught his eye.
Amid an ocean of static HTML files, it turned out that there was exactly one PHP script. Not sure what to expect, he was surprised when he discovered that the script was entirely comprised of vanilla HTML save for one line.
Back in the late-1990s, the Internet Service Provider where Simon C. worked was a mere micro-sized version of what they are today. Their website's original e-commerce system only needed to sell one thing — domain names, and a limited subset of them at that — so the shopping basket and invoicing parts of the system didn't need to be all that intelligent. They simply looped through each item ordered by the customer, displayed the description and prices of each one, and worked out the totals at the end. The whole process was so simple in fact that it made sense to the original developer to write the system so that the shopping cart and invoicing pages shared the same code.
Over time, the ISP grew in size to sell additional products such as new domain types and packages with a multitude of sub-products. Also, as the system grew in size, the site began running slower and slower. This gave Simon a reason to look into ways to improve the efficiency of the shopping basket and invoicing parts of the system.
We've all been there before. You spend all this time building a kick-ass, ultra-awesome, super-sweet web application and then you realize you need to build some stupid "administration" module that needs to do the boring, run-of-the-mill things like maintain users, groups, privileges, and so on.
There are several different magnitudes of complexity that can be involved with an administration module, ranging from the full-on set of tables including users, groups, roles, tasks, operations, etc., to a simple IsAdmin column on the users table. Actually, it turns out there's an even simpler way, and that Adam P's predecessor discovered and implemented it for their client's fairly large ecommerce website.
I have never written a bad line of code.
When I tell people that, they often scoff and offer replies like “so you’re not a programmer then?” and “let me guess, you’re a coding deity or something?” Well let me say, I am a programmer and I am not Codethulu, but in the same manner that Al Gore can fly around the world in a private jet without polluting, I have negated my bad code footprint through the purchase of Bad Code Offsets.
"I was put on a new Microsoft Access project recently," Stuart A writes, "and I've slowly been finding my way around the system as the need arises (read: as bugs are reported). As my eyes drifted over the numerous modules, one stopped me in my tracks. It was a module named 'modHmm'. I guessed the programmer was in a ponderous mood?. So naturally, I had a look inside..."
Option Compare Database Option Explicit Global t1qq Global t2qq Global t3qq ...
