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"I was once working for a company that primarily dealt with Oracle products," Tai writes.
That vendor, who shall not be named again, provided an installer. Tai ran it, and it failed. Since the installer was a shell script, she opened up the file and took a look.
If you browse the Errords, it's easy to see that "giving customers a discount" is apparently harder than it looks.
Brian's company had one of those "discounts are hard" problems, way back when. Sometimes instead of a discount reducing the price, it would raise it. The root cause was that the sales team setting up the promotions weren't clear about whether the discount amount should be a negative or positive number. Instead of adding validation to ensure they always entered a negative (or at least, a zero amount), one of Brian's predecessors fixed the bug in their C# like this:
George had gotten a new job as a contractor at a medium-sized book distributor. He arrived nice and early on Day 1, enthusiastic about a fresh start in a new industry.
Brett N. starts us off today with a timely notification that he received late on the 24th
Powers of two are second nature to a lot of programmers. They're nearly inescapable.
Equally inescapable are programmers finding new ways to do simple things wrong. Take Sander's co-worker, who needed to figure out, given a number of bits, what's the largest possible value you could store in that number of bits. You or I might reach for our language's pow function, but boy, in C++, that might mean you need to add an include file, and that sounds hard, so let's do this instead:
You’ll have to stay patient with me on this post, since the point I will eventually get to really is the confluence of a number of different threads that have been going through my head the past few weeks.
Let’s start with my time in business school from 2007 to 2009. Charles Dickens couldn’t have penned a better dichotomy between the beginning and end of my time in school. In short: 2007 = the economy couldn’t be better, 2009 = the economy couldn’t be worse.
Progress bars and throbbers are, in theory, tools that let your user know that a process is working. It's important to provide feedback when your program needs to do some long-running task.
Hegel inherited a rather old application, written in early versions of VB.Net. When you kicked off a long running process, it would update the status bar with a little animation, cycling from ".", to "..", to "...".
Molly's company has a home-grown database framework. It's not just doing big piles of string concatenation, and has a bunch of internal checks to make sure things happen safely, but it still involves a lot of hardcoded SQL strings.
Recently, Molly was reviewing a pull request, and found a Java block which looked like this:
