Jake Vinson

The billing application was slow. And not slow in the taking-30-seconds-to-start-up sense, but slow in the ridiculously-freaking-slow sense. Loading an invoice took between ten and fifteen minutes. Updating a line item on an invoice took up to a minute. And saving the invoice back to the database took even longer than loading it in the first place. Clearly, things couldn't stay this way – a minimum of 25 minutes to update a single invoice was completely unacceptable. They needed an expert. They needed... The Optimizer.

It was fall of 1995 and everyone was gearing up for the 1996 tax season. After years of maintenance of a DOS-based tax application, TaxQuik -- as we'll call the company -- had to get with the times. New, spunky companies were building tax software for Windows with fancy GUIs, integrated help and even Internet-enabled features, while TaxQuik was still in the text-based stone age of DOS.

Go ahead Michael Fulker, make your move. I'll count to one.

Diego G. lives in Argentina and is working with a developer from the USA on a PHP project. Recently they were discussing the merits of handling the communication from the backend to the frontend via XML or JSON. The system used XML elsewhere already, but for the new work it looked like it'd be quicker and easier to work with JSON in the PHP pages.

Having worked in support for years, Ben has amassed quite the compendium of quick stories.

"I work for a software development house that creates business software, maintaining legacy MFC applications," Graf writes. "We recently received an issue where a filter-toggle wouldn't switch back and forth, never changing from its default value. It's was a small utility function, rarely used, so we were a bit surprised to see it come up. Taking a quick glance at the code revealed the following:

I don't know, Dexter, I don't see anything weird about getting $50 fast cash...

-rw-r--r--. If that looks familiar to you, skip this and the next paragraph.

I can think of several ways to improve the code below from Jeff S., or at least to reduce its line count by two or three.

Tore S. had it made. He landed an enviable position that many of his fellow students had been gunning for – an evening/night shift as a Unix admin and general support for a large company that let him work from home. And you know what that means: equal time given to work and dancing around in your PJ's Risky Business-style. He could sleep and get paid for it, so long as he kept his cell phone on and would wake up and answer if/when it rang. Then he'd have to VPN into the network, do his thing, and then carefully weigh the decision to have another one-man dance party or go back to sleep. (Sleep usually won.)