Recent Feature Articles

Nov 2022

Classic WTF: Insecurity Doors

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It's Thanksgiving day in the US, and today, I'm thankful I'm not the person who had to spend the weekend hastily attaching baffles to 650 doors in a skyscraper because no one thought about how motion sensors worked. Original --Remy

It was a heck of a party and everyone was invited, from the executive vice president to the janitorial staff. There was champagne, shrimp, cake, and even a string quartet. There were door prizes, balloons, and all sorts of bank-branded knickknacks being given away. And it was all for good reason: the bank had just completed its high-tech, sixty-five story downtown corporate headquarters, and it was the tallest building within a three-hundred mile radius.

Virtually no expense was spared for the bank's skyscraper: a renowned architect was commissioned to design the building, skilled artisans adorned the corridors with marble statues, acoustical consultants made sure the lobby had just the right echo, and, most importantly, the world's foremost security firm was brought in to lock things down tighter than Fort Knox. It was considered less of a building and more of a work of art. The pinnacle of this creation was the high-tech sliding doors used throughout the building; this was the first time that StarTrek-esque doors were used on such a large scale.


Fixed the Bug

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2020 was a rough year for everyone. Eventually, it will end, but as we drag through to the end of 2020.2, it's sometimes hard to remember the beforetimes.

Sometime in that long era before 2020, Marc's team patched a bug in their software. Like good developers, the patch included a unit test. They could prove that the test failed before the fix, passed after the fix, and happily closed the ticket and went on to different things.