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when they came for...

Still, may as well try to make the best of it. Joey Coumeau wrote some pretty funny job applications:

http://www.asofterworld.com/oqarchive.php

Thanks a lot for that link. It's making my evening.

BTW, I need to insert this string in the thread:
fuck you dice.com
Also:
fuck dice.com

(because F U sometimes just isn't enough).

Seconded.

Still, may as well try to make the best of it. Joey Coumeau wrote some pretty funny job applications:

http://www.asofterworld.com/oqarchive.php

1.) Pearls Before Swine ( http://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine?ref=comics )

2.) Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal ( http://www.smbc-comics.com/ )
Examples:
* http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2835#comic
* http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2560#comic
* http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2674#comic

3.) Romantically Apocalyptic ( http://romanticallyapocalyptic.com/ )

4.) A softer world ( http://asofterworld.com/ )

A Softer World

http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=465

'If I have nothing to hide, then DON'T SEARCH ME'

They already have this but it doesn't get very good reviews.

Relevant comic :)

Read this post full screen with diagrams and photos

As I tend toward fleeting obsession, and writing up this account of my poor work experience at UnnamedCompanyXXX hits the spot in the exact way that I only wish editing my resumé did (as Joey Cameau puts it, resumé writing seems largely an exercise in "listing the store-bought parts of yourself that you respect the least") what follows is a rather long explanation. For the short answer, just scroll to the image at the bottom. (The forum may crop the image, so use your browser to view the full image if you must.)

I'm hoping some day to find enough interesting artifacts from my work there (like a graph I built of the model schema) to make a really bitchin TDWTF submission, but to directly answer your question: It would seem from my research (which was quite painstaking given that that company's idea of revision control was a stack of CD-R'd ZIP archives of their Java Servlets project directory) that the original hacker to build their web-based business coordination platform understood relational databases and data access abstractions.

He or she wrote Hibernate XML model schema (a technology I thoroughly enjoyed learning to use) with logical relationships between different models, and when I ran the graphing program I wrote (produced a GraphViz DOT graph, which was transformed into SVG and then fed into ZVTM) that model schema formed very cogent, logical constellations showing at most two or three individual constellations -- everything else was well connected and sane.

The later person(s) to work on their platform, however, had no understanding whatsoever of databases, SQL, or Hibernate (I didn't know about Hibernate either, but I learned.) The "holes" I mentioned were in fact new unformalized relationships in the model schema: the programmer(s) had actually added fields like "employeeName" to, say, the Project model, and employeeName was actually a numeric key corresponding to the model called Resource, which due to the lack of documentation, evaded me for some hours as actually meaning freelancers who we may call on or have called upon in the past. Now you might even think that it was a good thing that one of the clueless hackers in between the first hacker and myself thought "employee" was a more intuitive term for this role, but in fact Employee was another model altogether! Extremely confusing!!!

The reason their system was even ailing to begin with was because some hacker(s) had actually written database queries without any SQL -- they simply pulled (often many copies of) every instance of a certain type of model in the database into the servlet task, and then filtered them down to whatever subset it was that they wanted in Java-land. A similar sort of reach-around was employed to bridge relational connections between different models without taking advantage of the programming abstractions for those either.

The first couple of weeks I spent setting up a second server, revision control, bugzilla, documentation wiki, and familiarizing myself with the code (I didn't get any documentation for months.) I spent an entire month mired in a protracted software upgrade side-quest to avoid only a few critical shortcomings in only a few software components: because the system had not been properly maintained in so long, every single software component was out of date by years and had a slew of dependencies that needed upgrading.

The very first change I committed to the new Subversion repository removed 4000 lines of code and replaced it with 14.

One day (long after it was very relevant anymore, unfortunately) they finally got the previous hacker (who was too busy with better paying work to work there anymore) to come in and help answer my questions about the code. I pleaded with him t

I vote we use Kepler to watch out for the scumballs, so we can prepare to zap them before they arrive.

This A Softer World strip reflects that sentiment.

http://www.asofterworld.com/clean/gta.jpg

http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=346

"It's okay to care about privacy, even if you're not a criminal. Because maybe you just aren't a criminal yet"

only the dead can be absolutely certain of their future

Don't be so sure

Don't you just read comments in any contentious article? Or maybe view those lower-rated posts and see what the less lively discussions are. And then the rest of the people who dislike all the Idle posts can have less filler on Slashdot. Anyhow, I'd imagine this is pretty generic "disagree mail" for any major news collection + comment site. The world is full of nutty people who send in wacky letters to all sorts of places.

If you're looking for interesting letters, try overqualified, the wacky antics of Open letters to people or entities who are unlikely to respond, or get a copy of idiot letters (book). If that fails, just google around for "dumb letters."

A perfect example bashing XKCD
http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=338

http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=209

Ugh. This is masturbation. As in, it's uncomfortable to watch. Also, you spelled mystical wrong.

I've had the same feeling, briefly, drunk, and it was like being high. nobody wanted to be around me.

No no no, it's ducks you mean. http://www.asofterworld.com/soft_aug5_2005.htm is proof!

I've been more interested in the development of photobased comics, like Fluff in Brooklyn, http://www.asofterworld.com/ http://www.alienlovespredator.com/ and http://sinisterbedfellows.com./ Some of these have published print collections and Sinister Bedfellows appears in The Blotter, a NC monthly magazine.

A Softer World: My spidey-sense is tingling!

Friday's A Softer World strip was about this very topic!

Read the rest from their homepage.

Friday's A Softer World strip was about this very topic!

Read the rest from their homepage.