Profound Sadness

by in Error'd on

"Shortly after one of our dear colleagues left the business for pastures new, we started to find some messages they left behind," Samantha wrote.


Pointless Revenge

by in Representative Line on

We write a lot about unhealthy workplaces. We, and many of our readers, have worked in such places. We know what it means to lose our gruntle (becoming disgruntled). Some of us, have even been tempted to do something vengeful or petty to “get back” at the hostile environment.

Milton from 'Office Space' does not receive any cake during the a birthday celebration. He looks on, forlornly, while everyone else in the office enjoys cake.


A Painful Migration

by in Feature Articles on

Database models

In most companies, business growth leads to greater organizational complexity. With more clients to juggle, owners must increasingly delegate less important tasks to a growing pool of employees and lower management. With time, the org charts grow from simple diagrams to poster-sized trees. Departments and SBUs become separate entities. What was once a three-man startup morphs into the enterprise behemoth we all know and love.


What You Don't See

by in Coded Smorgasbord on

Many times, when we get a submission of bad code, we’re left wondering, “what else is going on here?” Sometimes, you think, “if only I knew more, this would make sense.” More often, you think, “if I knew more, I’d be depressed,” because the code is so clearly bad.

For example, Devan inherited a report, built using SQL Server’s Reporting Services Report Builder tool. Now, this tool is not intended as much as a developer tool, as a “if you can use Excel, you can make a report!” It uses Excel-style functions for everything, which means if you want to have branching conditional logic, you need to use the IIF function.


Classic WTF: The Big Ball of Yarn

by in Feature Articles on
It's Labor Day in the US, so we're taking the day off to grill something before the weather turns horrid. While I was finding legacy articles to support the Your Code Might Be Unmaintainable… article, I noticed this classic, and knew that I wanted to re-run it again soon. - Remy

Not too long ago, I posted The Enterprise Dependency. Essentially, it was a visual depiction of a good ole' enterprise framework that was "several dozen megabytes chock full of helper classes like IEnterpriseAuthenticationProviderFactoryManagementFactory." Inspired by the diagram, commenter "LieutenantFrost" shared his own "enterprise-ness and despair" with a dependency diagram that looks somewhat like an anglerfish.

But that got me thinking: like a Representative Line, perhaps dependency diagrams can help provide some insight into the pain that large applications' maintainers face each day. And just then, Jan-Hendrik sent in such a diagram. Note that each little box represents a class, and a line is its dependency to another class.


What's Wrong with Lorem Ipsum?

by in Error'd on

"The date is in the past and there is no time zone specification," writes Hugo K. "But apart from that, everything in this invitation is clear as...verterem mediocritatem?


Fully Wireless

by in Feature Articles on

DPA dfacto Vocal wired first edition

Port-au-Prince, I wanna catch a glimpse ...


"Performant" ""Development""

by in CodeSOD on

Birthday cake in ice cream shop in Basking Ridge New Jersey

Good intentions are never enough. If they aren't coupled with the wisdom to follow through properly, they can result in a horrible mess. Today’s Anonymous submitter has learned this the hard way:


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