Category: Humor

It’s a holiday in the US, so let’s celebrate our independence by looking into the life on an independent contractor. Original —Remy

As developers, we often find ourselves working in stupid ways because the folks who were hired above/before us think that what they set up is ideal. While this happens in numerous industries, finance, especially at huge conglomerates, takes IT/Software-WTF to a whole new level. As contractors, we often get the we need your help in an emergency even though everything is unicorns and rainbows speech that precedes some meltdown for which they want you to take the blame.

After taking a contract position at a large financial company, Bryan T. expected to see some amazing things. On the interview, they talked a big game and had even bigger budgets. It didn’t take long to see some amazing things; but not the kind of amazing you’d think.

To begin with, the managers and developers were still trying to roll their own time zones and caching. They didn’t understand any of these terms: object graph, business intelligence services, concurrency, message pump, domain model, and well-defined. Bryan even needed to explain to them why JavaScript on random web pages doesn’t have natural mechanisms to attach to .NET event handlers in other applications.

Their head DBA explained that the difference between a uniqueness constraint and a primary key was semantics, and that audit records and current records should always be stored in the same table so as to keep related data together. They even used a simple text column to store City, State and Country, which led to obvious issues like three different values for the US (“US”, “USA”, “US_TOTAL”).

We all need to conform to some semblance of coding practices. These folks decided to use anti-coding-practices. For example, IEntity was a class but the “I” prefix was used because it was returned from an API.

Shared common libraries were not allowed; if you needed to re-use a chunk of code, copy and paste it to where you need it; that’s why they implemented cut-n-paste across applications!

This also explains why SLOC is their primary productivity metric.

There were no planned releases or scheduled iterations; whenever someone barked, a snapshot was manually copied from local builds.

Perhaps most interesting of all, they had an awesome approach to branching. Instead of actually branching, they copied the whole code base into a new repository and ran that forward. Of course, this left a trail of repository droppings that you had to navigate.

It took Bryan quite a while to acclimate to all of this. Then the team received a massive product request. Unfortunately, nobody understood the concept of scalability, let alone why it had to be considered. Instead, they decided that Cowboy Coding would be the M.O. of the project.

At this point, Bryan decided he didn’t want the job all that much. That very day, he had to work with another developer with whom he’d not yet had the pleasure. Their task was to return some JSON from a web service call. After more than a month of work, the other developer proudly showed Bryan what he had come up with to return specific data from the web service:

    [
      ["Morning Workflow Status", 
          "http://initrodestatus:1234/dashboards/WTFProject/Morning%20Workflow%20Status"], 
      ["Scrape Status", 
          "http://initrodestatus:1234/dashboards/WTFProject/Scrape%20Status"],
      ["UK Nominations Storage", 
          "http://initrodestorage:1234/dashboards/WTFProject/UK%20Nominations%20Storage"]
    ]

For Bryan, it was the last straw.

Making fun of the headlines today, so you don’t have to

The news, even that about a record Texas heat wave, doesn’t need to be complicated and confusing; that’s what any new release from Microsoft is for. And, as in the case with anything from Microsoft, to keep the news from worrying our pretty little heads over, remember something new and equally indecipherable will come out soon:

Really all you need to do is follow one simple rule: barely pay attention and jump to conclusions. So, here are some headlines today and my first thoughts:

Texas heat wave smashes records with no relief

It’s so hot in Texas – if you’re there, you’re now considered deep in the hearth of Texas.

Ryan Seacrest to host Wheel of Fortune

Seacrest has as many jobs as George Santos claims to have.

Kristina Baikova, 28, VP at Russian Bank, Loko-Bank, fell to her death from an 11th floor window of her Moscow apartment in the early hours of Friday morning

… So, natural causes.

Supreme Court strikes down Biden student loan forgiveness

While Clarence Thomas wants people to pay off student loans the old-fashioned way, by becoming friends with Harlan Crow.

Jennifer Lawrence reveals ‘ultimate present’ she gave Robert De Niro after he welcomed baby number 7

I’m guessing, Maury Povich’s cell phone number.

Zuckerberg accepts cage match challenge from Musk

Apparently, it’ll be Geeko-Roman Wrestling rules.

Rob Schneider endorsed RFK Jr.

Can someone tell me who Lovitz got? So, I don’t have to give a rat’s ass about that either.

Lance Armstrong’s complains about fairness in sports

… the ball on that guy.

Video show Patriot Front and Proud Boys members fight, apparently, over which group is the Fed

Proud Boys fighting with Patriot Front sounds like the semi-finals of a Battle of the Boy Bands.

Why one of the principal designers of the Stealth Bomber is in a supermax prison

Because they’re afraid that once he disappears, he disappears.

Jefferson Davis Day in Alabama, still an official state holiday

In honor of it, people fly white flags.

RIP Alan Arkin

Serpentine, Serpentine …

Al Pacino and Noor Alfallah enjoy date night after welcoming baby boy

… No word if he got her home before curfew …

Trump expands his attack on special counsel Jack Smith to include Smith’s family and friends

… and Cracker Jacks, Jack Nicholson, Jack in the Beanstalk, Jack in the Box, Jack be Nimble, Little Jack Sprat …

LAUREN BOEBERT IS A LITTLE BITCH

Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene:
These two dimwitted & deranged divorcees
Have made their ex-husbands so happy now
Finally free from these stupid skanks’ idiocy.
Lauren “The Lush” Boebert is majorly pissed
That Marjorie Traitor Greene isn’t her friend.
Frenemies is more like it, no solidarity here
Except for their shared hatred of the queers.
These two terrible twits make people sick!
Having to listen to their stupid GOP bullshit:
First Bill Clinton was blown by a young Jew
How dare the sax-playing,
non-inhaling fool!
Lindsey Graham wished he was on his knees
Giving that blowjob to Mr. Bill – not Lewinsky!
So the Greedy Old Perverts of the GOP had
To impeach Clinton to protect fake morality.
While Lauren’s ex Jayson whips out his thing
At Colorado bowling alleys for all kids to see
Lauren lies about having been a paid escort
This has her former friend Marjorie so upset
Which is why obscene Greene called Boebert
“A LITTLE BITCH” on TV, but no cat fight yet.
Put that moronic matchup on
Pay-Per-View
Every Democrat I know would watch that shit
Because who doesn’t want to see those two
Racist Republican wenches mud wrestling?
Like the fascist pigs they are, they’d love it.
Dirty and filthy these two
pigs-in-a-pen be
So get the bikinis on and get in the mud, GOP
And make perv Ted Cruz say:
“Me so horny!”

Jake Pickering
Arcata, CA, USA

P.S. — You can find out more about me and my widely published writings by clicking on the link: https://muckrack.com/jake-pickering-1

Signed: Jake Pickering

Emmanuel Macron was playing a violent video game and losing. The zombies were just too fast and somehow they were getting smart. Macron thought they had no brains. He was the leader of France – surely he should always win the game against the enemy.

“I blame the children!” Emmanuel said to a long hollow room, once owned by one of the fascist kings of France, Louis the 2000th. His voice echoed back through time! “My name is Emmanuel, which is one of the many names of Jesus. I and my parents were good Catholics. I am not garbage! My name tells me that I must be a god and always in the right! I will tell the parents of France to keep their kids locked up without supper, send them to bed nice and early, and if they try to loiter on the streets of Paris, I will declare martial law. My good friend – a brother from another mother – Justin Trudeau did the same to his filthy childish people. Lock ‘em up and take away their money and brand them as bad – that way the leader appears good!”

Emmanuel put his game on “Pause” and poured himself a tall glass of champagne before looking out the tall window, down into the streets of Paris.

“Mon Dieu! The streets are burning! I must go on vacation! Maybe to Algiers? No, too soon – and now they’re coming here! I must ban video games and rap music and anything children like. I am an adult, and when the streets of Paris burn, I am the hose!”

He downed his champagne, cracked open the window, unzipped his pants, and let loose a golden stream that would douse all the freedoms and equalities and fraternities of La France.

Louis the Sun King laughed in his grave, and sipped a Burgundy Chardonnay from 1711, Year of Our Lord, Satan.

Tina works for a major European government. During the height pandemic, her team needed to roll out many new sites to support remote, self-service interactions with government agencies.

On one of these sites, they needed to create a contact form. The contact form was one of those that applied a character limit to the message. This character limit meant that the code needed to check the length of the input string, and then compare that against some max characters, and then output the “characters remaining” in an output field.

function textCounter(theField,theCharCounter,maxChars)
{
	var strTemp = "";

	for (var i = 0; i < theField.value.length; i++)
	{
		var strChar = theField.value.substring(i, i + 1);
		strTemp += strChar;
	}
	theCharCounter.value = maxChars - strTemp.length;
};

theField is the textarea. theCharCounter is a read-only input field, where we store the output. And the for loop in the middle of this function is where we lose our minds.

They create a strTemp, and then for each character in the input, we grab a substring of that character and append it to strTemp. Then we compare strTemp.length against our maxChars to calculate the remaining characters.

In many cases, when I look at bad code, I can get a sense of how or why someone blundered down the path they’re on, but this one is a real puzzler. They use the length to drive the for loop! They already understood what length is for. Are they worried about the value mutating while this function executes? If so, I’ve got bad news for them about how JavaScript runs in a browser context, and also, if that were the case, what is this supposed to do anyway?

They could have solved this problem easily, but instead they went to great lengths.

Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Constitution received two amazing honors in 2006, winning both a Pulitzer Prize and the Reuben award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year. This was the second Pulitzer for Luckovich; his first was awarded in 1995. He had previously received the Reuben award for Editorial Cartooning in 2001, but this was his first time to be named the overall outstanding cartoonist by a group of his peers. The Reuben awards are distributed each year by the National Cartoonists Society and are considered professional cartooning’s highest honor.

Impressive as these achievements are, they are only the latest in a long line of awards for Luckovich. He was a runner-up for the Pulitzer in 1987 before garnering the 1995 win.  In 1989, he won the Overseas Press Club’s award for the “Best Cartoons on Foreign Affairs for 1989,” and in 1991, he was awarded the National Headliners award for editorial cartoonists. In 1994, a Luckovich cartoon was selected by voters in a Newsweek magazine poll as one of the four best editorial cartoons of the year.

After freelancing and selling life insurance to make ends meet following his graduation from the University of Washington in 1982, Luckovich landed his first cartooning job at the Greenville News in South Carolina. After nine months at the News, Luckovich was hired by The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, where he stayed for four years before moving on to Atlanta.

Luckovich’s cartoons, syndicated nationally by Creators Syndicate, appear in more than 350 daily publications, including The Washington Post,The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Denver Post, Newsday, New York Post, The Cleveland Plain-Dealer, The Dallas Morning News, the Boston Globe, the Seattle Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Nashville Tennessean and the Houston Chronicle, and are reprinted regularly in Time, Newsweek and the New York Times.

Luckovich and his wife, Margo, have four children. His hobbies include exercising and collecting unique ties.

Laughter is a great coping mechanism. Especially during an incredibly serious, dramatic, or horrifying movie. If you’re a millennial like me and you’ve lived through traumatic experiences such as 9/11, Covid, and the Taylor Swift eras tour, it should be no surprise that people are laughing at scenes that clearly aren’t intended to be funny.