Articles

Sebastian sat near a window, enjoying a hot dog in the warmth of the sun. The day was going wonderfully so far – he was the first to get to the newspaper that was left in the break room daily (and usually gutted by noon), he'd found a quarter face up near his desk, and his hot dog was particularly good since someone had left relish in the fridge with a note inviting anyone to help themselves. At first, he hardly noticed the hurried, heavy footsteps coming in behind him – "My f–cking VPN connection is broken again! Can't you stop fiddling with the god damn network‽"

This code was sent to John W. by the support staff of one of the larger software vendors with the stated purpose of determining how much memory a program could use on one of the corporation's Unix servers. 

Fresh out of school, Maxim was able to score himself a pretty sweet entry level position in a small private bank. Rather than being responsible for maintaining the company's static phone book on the corporate intranet or some other stereotypical entry level thing, he was placed in the understaffed Publications department to do some surprisingly heavy impacting IT work.

"Hmmm," Michael pondered, "the 4-minute Shrimp takes 10 minutes to prep and 7 minutes to cook... maybe it only takes 4 minutes to eat?"

Have you ever found yourself writing a function to do something that seems pretty simple, then months or years later you find out there's a built-in function to accomplish exactly what you were doing? Maybe you didn't know where to look or the built-in function's name was confusing. I'd argue that Java's toUpperCase() does not fall in this category.