Forums
These fine folks make it possible to run The Daily WTF.
Or cold. It's getting hot and cold. But on average... no. It's absolutely unbelievable.
"There's been a physics breakthrough!" Mate exclaimed. "Looking at meteoblue, I should probably reconsider that hike on Monday." Yes, you should blow it off, but you won't need to.
Mads introduces today's code sample with this line: " this was before they used git to track changes".
Note, this is not to say that they were using SVN, or Mercurial, or even Visual Source Safe. They were not using anything. How do I know?
I am on record as not particularly loving JSON as a serialization format. It's fine, and I'm certainly not going to die on any hills over it, but I think that as we stripped down the complexity of XML we threw away too much.
On the flip side, the simplicity means that it's harder to use it wrong. It's absent many footguns.
"This keeps giving me a primary key violation!" complained one of Nancy's co-workers. "Screw it, I'm dropping the primary key constraint!"
That was a terrifying thing to hear someone say out loud. Nancy decided to take a look at the table before anyone did anything they'd regret.
Adam's organization was going through a period of rapid growth. Part of this growth was spinning up new backend services to support new functionality. The growth would have been extremely fast, except for one thing applying back pressure: for some reason, spinning up a new service meant recompiling and redeploying all the other services.
Adam didn't understand why, but it seemed like an obvious place to start poking at something for improvement. All of the services depended on a library called "ServiceLib"- though not all of them actually used the library. The library was a set of utilities for administering, detecting, and interacting with services in their environment- essentially a homegrown fabric/bus architecture.
Michael R. is back with receipts. "I have been going to Tayyabs for >20 years. In the past they only accepted cash tips. Good to see they are testing a new way now."
Misha has a co-worker who has unusual ideas about how database performance works. This co-worker, Ted, has a vague understanding that a SQL query optimizer will attempt to find the best execution path for a given query. Unfortunately, Ted has just enough knowledge to be dangerous; he believes that the job of a developer is to write SQL queries that will "trick" the optimizer into doing an even better job, somehow.
This means that Ted loves subqueries.
Carlos and Claire found themselves supporting a 3rd party logistics package, called IniFreight. Like most "enterprise" software, it was expensive, unreliable, and incredibly complicated. It had also been owned by four different companies during the time Carlos had supported it, as its various owners underwent a series of acquisitions. It kept them busy, which is better than being bored.
One day, Claire asked Carlos, "In SQL, what does an exclamation point mean?"