OddThinking

Here is a short, fictionalised, autobiographical play I wrote, in which unit-tests cause more technical debt than the code.

Tying together the Nonblocking Log Handler story.

It’s a corporate Christmas party, around 1999. The dot com crash hasn’t happened yet, the party-organisers have a considerable budget, 200-300 guests, and an idea of a good time strongly influenced by the company’s sales and marketing teams – people who have a tendency to differ from my idea of a good time.

I consider how to maximise my happiness in this situation.

“That’s so true!” she interjected, while I started kicking myself for my own stupidity. How did I let myself get in this awkward situation again?

In which Julian proposes a hypothetical – how could the default parameters on urllib2 bring down an application 29 minutes past midnight on a Saturday morning?

I was going to go into a rant questioning what century we are in…

But then I did some research for this post.

I have some learned some things this week about Blu Tack.

One day, Bream LeFish added an evil new feature to his BBS, and then sat back and watched the fun.

The most challenging part of the data-entry was keeping focussed on such a tedious task. Allow me to illustrate how desperate I got.

There was a rumour out on the web out there that HAL BBS wasn’t to be trusted – it had two backdoors built into the software. It was compiled BASIC, so it wasn’t easy to view the source, but I had a bash at finding those backdoors.