Jake Vinson

Jonathan did a double-take when he glanced over this function:

Persistence is Key After two years, Thomas B. had become somewhat bored with his job. He was the first developer the small TV station had ever hired, and while he enjoyed building a PHP-based CMS that they'd use internally, over time his job had essentially been reduced to babysitting the web site. He accepted another offer and told his boss about his plans to leave.

When I'm creating a function, I try to make sure it passes two simple tests: Using the function should require less code than just duplicating what the function does, and whatever the function does shouldn't be the same as a built-in operator

Ralph's rage was the stuff of legend – and it was equaled only by his anal-retentiveness.

Matt K., I really hope you didn't eat these.

If I had a dollar for every time I've seen someone doing custom date and time parsing, I'd have somewhere between eight and ten dollars. It's just not something you see much of these days. All major programming languages have built-in support for parsing dates, times, currency, etc., and programmers are pretty good about using them.

"When you work in computing services for a university, you spend about as much time on high-minded development as you do un-jamming printers and resetting passwords for faculty," Ed G. writes. "It's not ideal, but it's a living." It was time to get some new staff, and after being burned by some previous employees that could talk the talk, but not walk the walk, they devised a new litmus test for potential hires, called "The Receptionist Test."

Call it confirmation bias, call it superstition, but as developers and human beings, we're all susceptible to it. Say you're working on a particularly tricky bit of code, so you've fallen back on the "try all kinds of crazy crap until it passes the specific test case" method, an invaluable tool for all developers. You find an approach that works, and while you're not sure exactly why it worked, you keep it in mind for the future.

It was 11:30 in the morning, and Dante (as we'll call him) was more than ready for lunch. His stomach let out a low growl to remind him that he'd skipped breakfast and had a light dinner the previous night. Embarrassed, he leaned forward to stifle the growl. Just 30 more minutes. Dante wished he could go to lunch right then, but his colleague that he was going with was in a meeting until noon. He tried to keep his thoughts on other things, but couldn't stay focused. His pencil cup looked like it was full of pretzels, his wall clock looked like a cake, and the nearby receptionist looked like ham. His hallucinations were interrupted by the phone.

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In the 1980's we loved Nintendo. And even better, in the 1980's Nintendo loved us. They gave us games, we played them. They gave us cereal that was basically Kix with fun Nintendo-themed boxes, and we ate it and pretended to like it. They gave us movies like Super Mario Bros., widely considered the greatest film in the history of filmmakingcitation needed. We watched the cartoons, learned how to Do the Mario (ideal if the Macarena is too complex for you), slept in the sheets, memorized the codes, subscribed to Nintendo Power, and hooked up all manner of ridiculous equipment to our TVs.

Eric Lizotte's wife bought some granola from Wild Oats because it fits in to their low-null diet.

I can't imagine a world without content filtering. Just think of all innocent children, parents, and grandparents that would be irreparably harmed from seeing those certain vile combinations of letters that we call "swear words." While I've been forever changed by seeing such words, I long for the days when I thought that "f...ing" was just a short way of writing floccinaucinihilipilificating. And I truly believe that it's my duty to protect the innocent from being exposed to those dastardly words and let them believe that an f-bomb simply refers to a friendly-bomb, as in, a shower of hugs and kisses.

CommQuack hires like crazy. They hire in good times, they hire in bad times. They hire before, during, and after periods of massive layouts. Only one department was sheltered from the endless churn of hirings and layoffs — HR. For a company of ten thousand people, the fact that one thousand of them worked in HR should tell you something.

 

As the seasons change and years pass, trees accumulate rings that can be used to determine the age of the tree. This is a result of seasonal growth — the inner section of each ring is formed in the early part of the rapid growth season; this wood is called "early wood" (*snicker*). Then as the temperature changes and growth slows, the darker outer portion of the ring forms ("late wood"). And who can forget the classic scene from Vertigo in which Kim Novak's character hints at a passion for dendrochronology as she finds the years of her birth and death on the rings of a tree. Why do I bring this up? Because seeing bits of the past frozen in time is fascinating.

For several years, Clint's company has been working on a game that's undergone several engine and tool changes. And I'll stop you right there- it's not Duke Nukem Forever because this game exists, and has been released.

"Root beer guy." That's what Dale had always called Burt in his internal monologue. He occupied a similar space in Dale's mind with "Too much makeup" lady, "I always go tanning" guy, and "I always talk about horses" lady. Burt was one of the ever-present background characters of the office, his only differentiating trait a bottle of root beer. And even though he was a net-admin and Dale worked helpdesk, their paths had never really crossed.

Michael F. arrived to an ugly sight — an inbox full of messages with the same subject line. "ERROR: Invalid data near '<Carrier '" And that could only mean one thing. The shipping software company had released a patch to their web service. Having suffered through updates of ClearPath Logistics' software before, he knew exactly how this was going to go.