Recent Feature Articles

Feb 2020

Copy/Paste Culture

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Mark F had just gone to production on the first project at his new job: create a billables reconciliation report that an end-user had requested a few years ago. It was clearly not a high priority, which was exactly why it was the perfect items to assign a new programmer.

"Unfortunately," the end user reported, "it just doesn't seem to be working. It's running fine on test, but when I run it on the live site I'm getting a SELECT permission denied on the object fn_CalculateBusinessDays message. Any idea what that means?"

40 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-26

Logs in the Cloud

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Carrol C just joined IniTech. They were hiring for someone who could help them tame their cloud costs. There’s a lot of money being spent on AWS. Management had bought in on the “it’s cheaper than on-prem”, and were starting to wonder why that promise wasn’t being fulfilled.

After a little settling in period, Carrol had his credentials for their AWS environment, and started digging around just to familiarize himself with the infrastructure. This environment had started as an on-prem system that got migrated to the cloud, so the infrastructure was mostly a collection of virtual-machines using attached virtual disks- EBS- for storing data.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-20

Hop Scotch

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IniTech’s fashion division, IniGarment, launched their new accounting solution by hiring “best in class” highly-paid-consultants (HPCs). The system launched, collapsed under the weight of the first week of use, hardware was thrown at the problem in an absolute crisis panic, and the end result was that they had a perfectly serviceable accounting package that was overbudget and supported by expensive HPCs.

It wasn’t sustainable. So out the HPCs went, and in came a pile of salaried employees. Jeff was one of those. His first six weeks at IniGarment were spent trying to understand the nest of stored procedures, quick hacks, and ugly choices. One of the first puzzles Jeff decided to look into was an invoice uploading step.

42 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-14

A Short REST

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I’m starting to wonder if we need a “Representative API” category. There are just so many ways in which a developer can mess up basic tasks, like mapping a RESTful API to their backend.

Today’s anonymous submitter was working with a REST API provided by a “world leading parcel” company. Everything started well. The documentation was thorough, contained links to example projects, and it came with a Swagger API doc. Based on that documentation and based on the Swagger doc, they went ahead and tried to CURL the API for a specific endpoint:

69 comments - Last comment @ 2024-01-02
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