For me I think it has to be the scripting language of an old proprietary telephony platform I used in the early 2000s. The language itself was not so bad, but the fact that it was meant to be edited with a drag-and-drop GUI, which did not expose all the functionality I needed, was quite frustrating. I also remember having to manually imp...
I was wondering if anyone tried migrating between TS and SVN/CC. What I mean by migrating is importing and exporting the repository between source control systems without losing the history. How good are the tools to migrate to and from VSTS? I am also interested in knowing any opinion regarding using Team System from users of SVN an...
Sometimes you don't have the source code and need to reverse engineer a program or a black box. Any fun war stories? Here's one of mine: Some years ago I needed to rewrite a device driver for which I didn't have source code. The device driver ran on an old CP/M microcomputer and drove a dedicated phototypesetting machine through a se...
Dijkstra once noted that a programmer can reasonably expect to have to work within a range of at least thirty orders of magnitude- from dealing with individual bits all the way up to gigabyte-sized units. Let's test this. In your career, what was the smallest level of data manipulation you have worked on, and the largest? In which direc...
Finding bugs is part of a programmer's lifestyle. But there are some bugs that are just plain weird and the solution to them are unintuitive. Post stories that has happened to you or someone else that involves these types of bugs. If you want, you can post links to great programming bug stories. One bug story per post but you can post ...
I'm writing a chapter of my dissertation that deals with contextual cues and I'm looking for good examples of comments (or todo comments) where it's obvious that whoever wrote them had some knowledge that he didn't bother sharing with future readers, making them difficult to interpret. Examples from publicly available code would be esp...
I'm looking for interesting war stories on situations where you had a bug because you missed something important in the documentation of a class you were instantiating or a function/method you were using. For example, I recently messed up by not reading the documentation for the Java Calendar class and noticing that it counts months fro...
VSS is much maligned and perhaps justifiably so. Please don't confuse me as an apologist for it, as I gave up on it a while back in favor of Vault. However, despite using VSS for over 10 years on numerous projects with development teams between 3 and 10 developers, I never experienced (or to be fair, noticed) any data loss. I will admi...
Users sometimes come up with the most amusing, weird and wonderful requirements for programmers to design and implement. Today I read a memo from my boss that we need the "ability to import any excel or access data, irrespective of size, easily and quickly." From the same memo, we have a requirement to "know if anyone unauthorized acce...
There are good times and there are worst times. I recently had to write code in a hot room with temperatures near 107°F (42°C); nothing to sit on; 64 Kbps inconsistent internet connection; warm water for drinking and a lot of distractions and interruptions. I am sure many people have been in similar situations and I would like to know yo...
Hello, I have been given the task of exploring the maven-release-plugin before we try using it on our project. As of now, the releases are done manually on request. This process involves (skip this part if you're not interested, it's just to give you an idea): In the head, open the base POM file: Increment the numbering of the \proje...
There's pat advice about the recommended practice of code review/pair programming, allocating budget for testing, writing unit tests, using design by contract, and on and on. Some environments are so resource constrained or historically idiosyncratic that practices like these are not welcome as suggestions. For most of my working life,...