Recent Feature Articles

Sep 2019

Accounting for Changes

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Sara works as a product manager for a piece of accounting software for a large, international company. As a product manager, Sara interacts with their internal customers- the accounting team- and Bradley is the one she always bumps heads with.

Bradley's idea of a change request is to send a screenshot, with no context, and a short message, like "please fix", "please advise", or "this is wrong". It would take weeks of emails and, if they were lucky, a single phone call, for Sara's team to figure out what needs to be fixed, because Bradley is "too busy" to provide any more information.

38 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-02

Redesign By Committee

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Sample web form

Carl was excited to join his first "real" company and immerse himself in the World of Business. The fresh-faced IT Analyst was immediately assigned to a "cross-strata implementation team" tasked with redesigning the RMA form completed by customers when they returned goods. The current form had been flagged for various weaknesses and omissions.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2019-09-27

A Learning Experience

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Jakob M. had the great pleasure of working as a System Administrator in a German school district. At times it was rewarding work. Most of the time it involved replacing keyboard keys mischievous children stole and scraping gum off of monitor screens. It wasn't always the students that gave him trouble though.

Frau Fritzenberger was a cranky old math teacher at a Hauptschule near Frankfurt. Jakob regularly had to answer support calls she made for completely frivolous things. Having been teaching since before computers were a thing, she put up a fight for every new technology or program Jakob's department wanted to implement.

54 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-22

Death by Consumption

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Tryton Party Module Address Database Diagram

The task was simple: change an AMQ consumer to insert data into a new Oracle database instead of an old MS-SQL database. It sounded like the perfect task for the new intern, Rodger; Rodger was fresh out of a boot camp and ready for the real world, if he could only get a little experience under his belt. The kid was bright as they came, but boot camp only does so much, after all.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-22

Classic WTF: Hyperlink 2.0

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It's Labor Day in the US, where we celebrate the workers of the world by having a barbecue. Speaking of work, in these days of web frameworks and miles of unnecessary JavaScript to do basic things on the web, let's look back at a simpler time, where we still used server-side code and miles of unnecessary JavaScript to do basic things on the web. Original. --Remy

For those of you who haven't upgraded to Web 2.0 yet, today's submission from Daniel is a perfect example of what you're missing out on. Since the beginning of the Web (the "1.0 days"), website owners have always wanted to know who was visiting their website, how often, and when. Back then, this was accomplished by recording each website "hit" in a log file and running a report on the log later.

But the problem with this method in Web 2.0 is that people don't use logs anymore; they use blogs, and everyone knows that blogs are a pretty stupid way of tracking web traffic. Fortunately, Daniel's colleagues developed an elegant, clever, and -- most importantly -- "AJAX" way of solving this problem. Instead of being coded in HTML pages, all hyperlinks are assigned a numeric identifier and kept in a database table. This identifier is then used on the HTML pages within an anchor tag:

11 comments - Last comment @ 2019-09-05
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