Lawrence's employer had heard that this newfangled "Desktop PC" could reduce their IT costs, and they wanted in on it. It was the mid 80s, and at the time, their plants scattered all over Alabama connected to a central mainframe via dumb terminals connected over very expensive leased lines. It was time to upgrade, and Lawrence wasn't in charge of it. He didn't get called in until things went wrong.
"This new PC system is really slow," he was told while on a plant tour. That didn't sound likely- the PCs were running blisteringly fast 4.77MHz, 8088 CPUs with 16Kb of RAM, and since someone had connected "arithmetic-heavy accounting usage" to "floating point processing", they all had 8087 co-processors. There was no way they were slow, especially since half the time they were just running a 3270 terminal emulator.
"We're had been using a manufacturer's web service, but started getting errors all of a sudden," wrote Peter Lindgren. "Something has really, really failed."
<StatusCode>InternalServerError</StatusCode> <StatusDescription>Internal Server Error</StatusDescription> <WebHeaders> <X-Backside-Transport>FAIL FAIL,FAIL FAIL,FAIL FAIL</X-Backside-Transport> </WebHeaders>
Everybody in the IT department was quite happy -- even a little surprised -- with how well the outsourced project to replace the legacy billing system was progressing.
Well, actually, the project managers weren't all that surprised. Over the past four months, they'd pumped out reams of specs and design documents, often boasting that their level of planning hadn't been seen since the Apollo missions. So, for them, the fact that everything was turning out as designed spoke volumes about the success of their planning and processes.
Local businesses aren't exactly known for their web savviness or IT prowess. And for the most part, that's just fine. You'd be better off judging a prospective attorney on the suit he wears rather than the website he maintains, as that at least has some tangential relationship to practicing law. But usually, you'd just go with whomever a trusted colleague recommended, anyway.
For restaurants however, this is quickly changing. With smartphones becoming the norm, many people will use the web to discover the restaurants around them, see what menus they have, and get a general vibe for the place. And as such, local restaurants do become judged by their web savviness – or at least, their ability to maintain a halfway-decent website.
"Bit manipulation can be tricky," writes Nathan, "especially if you have no familiarity with bitwise operators or logic."
"At least, that's what my smarter-than-built-in-language-features colleague must have thought when he authored setBit. Fortunately, his code was the only one that utilized this function, as it doesn't quite work as advertised."
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And now back to our regularly scheduled program...
"At my company," writes Ryan L, "we have a 'certain' developer who has been here a while but is very reluctant to learn or improve. In fact, he actively works against the rest of us when we want to implement pesky things like proper version control, design patterns, or architecture to our code behind having 3000-line code-behind files."
Ryan continues, "I was exploring our SVN logs and came across something checked in by this "engineer". It was a single file, with a commit message of 'Mybad'. The file turned out to be a config file. Here was the previous version checked in:
"A little while back, someone introduced the concept of 'self-documenting' code to our team," writes Ryan L. "It was certainly a step forward, but it's somehow taken us two steps backwards. Consider, for example, the following code from an MVC controller."
if (TheFormIsInvalid()) return View("Index", form);
... snip ...
private bool TheFormIsInvalid()
{
return ModelState.IsValid == false;
}
