Tennyson is lucky. While most .NET developers are limited to the .NET Framework (and the thousands of available third-party libraries) to solve their software development problems, Tennyson's toolbox touts the Global Services Enterprise Systems Framework. Well, technically, the GSESF is the only library allowed, but then again, it's the only library one should ever need.
"Third-party libraries introduce unnecessary risk into projects," the Global Services Enterprise Systems Lead Architect – or, The Architect, as he preferred to be called – would often say. "If the library is closed sourced, then we will be unable to fix bugs. If it is open-sourced, then we will not only have another codebase to maintain, but it will introduce certain legal risks."
"Our company's product is designed to help analysts aggregate all sorts of different data together," Charles writes, "we take a snapshot (a zipfile of the working directory) at various times, and create a few backup versions for good measure."
"From a programming standpoint, there are a few ways I could imagine implementing this functionality. This was not one of them."
The following is one of two stories we gathered during the Pitch a WTF panel at Penguicon. As I'm sure you'll come to understand, the submitter wanted both them and their company to remain anonymous. Thank you to everyone who came out and inflicted their horrors in person.
"One of our clients was having 'issues' with their mission-critical, flagship web application," writes Mark Doyle, "and of course, it was on me to fix them."
"I knew it was going to be a fun day when I saw this as the entirety of deafult.aspx. The code does absolutely nothing."
"In a strictly object oriented environment like C#/.NET," writes J.D., "there's really no such thing as 'global variables'. Sure, you can create a public class called 'Global' with a bunch of static fields, but the folks looking to (ab)use global variables generally have a hard time making that conceptual leap."
"I work with those people each and every day — most of them senior to me — and while they haven't quite made that conceptual leap, they have discovered a workaround."
"Hey, Stan. Congrats on your promotion," John S. said without terribly much sincerity. Stan was a nice enough co-worker, but a promotion to VP doesn't mean much to a company that hands out promotions like glowsticks at a rave. Stan was now the 4th VP in the 30 person company. It didn't actually mean very much at all.
"Well, thanks John. I'm really excited. I talked to the other VPs, and they're all really enthusiastic about my proposals."
"Following the code-as-a-commodity principle," writes Jan, "our management team not only sends large projects overseas, but goes with the lowest bidder."
/**
* @param str The string which must put into 2 Signle Quat
* @return The single quated String
*/
public String SingleQautedString(String str) {
return "'" + str + "'";
}
rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr (from Ken Cox)
It was 1994, and I was working for a small weekly newspaper. One fine morning, the lady who handles subscriptions called me up to say that her computer had “gone crazy”, and that I need to help her right away. Being the closest thing to desktop support that the small paper had, I dropped what I was doing and went to see what she meant by “crazy”.
When I stopped in her office, I noticed that her screen was filled up with line after line of ever-expanding “r”s. Looking down at her keyboard, I saw that the “r” and several other keys were stuck down. Turning to her, I asked the obvious: “did you spill anything on your keyboard?”
