Recent Feature Articles

Feb 2018

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In software development, there are three kinds of problems: small, big and subtle. The small ones are usually fairly simple to track down; a misspelled label, a math error, etc. The large ones usually take longer to find; a race condition that you just can't reproduce, an external system randomly feeding you garbage, and so forth.

Internet word cloud

The subtle problems are an entirely different beast. It can be as simple as somebody entering 4321 instead of 432l (432L), or similar with 'i', 'l', '1', '0' and 'O'. It can be an interchanged comma and period. It can be something more complex, such as an unsupported third party library that throws back errors for undefined conditions, but randomly provides so little information as to be useful to neither user nor developer.


Shiny Side Up

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CD-ROM

It feels as though disc-based media have always been with us, but the 1990s were when researchers first began harvesting these iridescent creatures from the wild in earnest, pressing data upon them to create the beast known as CD-ROM. Click-and-point adventure games, encyclopedias, choppy full-motion video ... in some cases, ambition far outweighed capability. Advances in technology made the media cheaper and more accessible, often for the worst. There are some US households that still burn America Online 7.0 CDs for fuel.


Cousin of ITAPPMONROBOT

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Logitech Quickcam Pro 4000

Every year, Initrode Global was faced with further and further budget shortages in their IT department. This wasn't because the company was doing poorly—on the contrary, the company overall was doing quite well, hitting record sales every quarter. The only way to spin that into a smaller budget was to dream bigger. Thus, every quarter, the budget demanded greater and greater increases in sales, and the exceptional growth was measured against the desired phenomenal growth and found wanting.


It's Called Abstraction, and It's a Good Thing

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Steven worked for a company that sold “big iron” to big companies, for big bucks. These companies didn’t just want the machines, though, they wanted support. They wanted lots of support. With so many systems, processing so many transactions, installed at so many customer sites, Steven’s company needed a better way to analyze when things went squirrelly.

Thus was born a suite of applications called “DICS”- the Diagnostic Investigation Console System. It was, at its core, a processing pipeline. On one end, it would reach out to a customer’s site and download log files. The log files would pass through a series of analytic steps, and eventually reports would come out the other end. Steven mostly worked on the reporting side of things.


Budget Cuts

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Xavier was the head of a 100+ person development team. Like many enterprise teams, they had to support a variety of vendor-specific platforms, each with their own vendor-specific development environment and its own licensing costs. All the licensing costs were budgeted for at year’s end, when Xavier would submit the costs to the CTO. The approval was a mere formality, ensuring his team would have everything they needed for another year.

Unfortunately, that CTO left to pursue another opportunity. Enter Greg, a new CTO who joined the company from the financial sector. Greg was a penny-pincher on a level that would make the novelty coin-smasher you find at zoos and highway rest-stops jealous. Greg started cutting costs left and right immediately. When the time came for budgeting development tool licensing, Greg threw down the gauntlet on Xavier’s “wild” spending.

Alan Rickman, in Galaxy Quest, delivering the line, 'By Grabthar's Hammer, what a savings' while looking like his soul is dying forever. "By Grabthar's Hammer, what a savings."

For Want of a CR…

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A few years ago I was hired as an architect to help design some massive changes to a melange of existing systems so a northern foreign bank could meet some new regulatory requirements. As a development team, they gave me one junior developer with almost a year of experience. There were very few requirements and most of it would be guesswork to fill in the blanks. OK, typical Wall Street BS.

Horseshoe nails, because 'for want of a nail, the shoe was lost…

The junior developer was, well, junior, but bright, and he remembered what you taught him, so there was a chance we could succeed.


We Sell Bonds!

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We Sell Bonds!

The quaint, brick-faced downtown office building was exactly the sort of place Alexis wanted her first real programming job to be. She took a moment to just soak in the big picture. The building's façade oozed history, and culture. The busy downtown crowd flowed around her like a tranquil stream. And this was where she landed right out of college-- if this interview went well.

Alexis went inside, got a really groovy start-up vibe from the place. The lobby slash waiting room slash employee lounge slash kitchen slash receptionist desk was jam packed full of boxes of paperwork waiting to be unpacked and filed (once a filing cabinet was bought). The walls, still the color of unpainted drywall, accented with spats of plaster and glue-tape. Everything was permeated with chaotic beginnings and untapped potential.