Articles

When Glen Sommers was hired to add some features to a Cold Fusion based web application for a non-profit organization, he wasn't surprised by the quality he found, instead he expected it.

"I received these three letters all on the same day," wrote Martin P., "two were sent October 31st and the other November 1st, and they all said pretty much the exact same thing. At least it's comforting to know we're saving trees."

It's All About C Now (from Dan M) Last year, I saw that a certain founded-and-headquartered-in-the-Netherlands electronics company was hiring web developers in my town, so sent in my résumé. Like most résumés, mine contained the standard skills & buzzword section: Languages and technical writing: PHP, MySQL, AJAX, JavaScript, PRADO Framework, MSSQL Server, C#, .Net Framework, Perl, C/C++, Visual Basic, ASP, HTML, DHTML, XML, SOAP, CSS, Java, UML

You'd think that buying things online eliminates the human element of shopping in a retail store. And you'd almost be right.

Jim B. stared wistfully in the mirror at the wrinkles near his eyes and the few stray gray hairs that he’d accumulated over the last six months. On the way back to his desk, he stopped by his friend Mike's desk. “Point three six,” he said as he banged his head against Mike's cubicle wall. “Point three six.”

"That's nothing to smile at, Brett," writes David Robinson, "EntityName parsing errors are serious business."

Some time ago Martin F. was sent in by his IT consulting company to help fix some problems with the HR Database at a major European banking / insurance firm.  He admits that the WTF worthy warning signs were there at the onset (among them being that he was the 4th in a series of consultants assigned to this project), but being relatively naive to such things, he accepted the position and spent a year shaking his head in bewilderment and, at the same time, his fists at Rob.  He was an HR 'specialist' and a true IT genius who had a self-proclaimed hobby of programming in Visual Basic and was, of course, long gone from the corporation. The HR Access-pool

The Bug That Shut Down Computers World-Wide was originally published on October 2nd, 2007, and today marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the story. Here’s to a great 2009!