Let's say you have a web application, and you need to transfer some data that exists in your backend, server-side, down to the front-end, client-side. If you're a normal person, you have the client do an HTTP request and return the data in something like a JSON format. You could certainly do that. Or, you could do what Alicia's predecessor did. <script>...

Ben's web firm took on a new client, and they're using a rather questionable shopping cart system. Like a lot of PHP web plugins, someone decided that they needed to "protect" their code by obfuscating it. Either that, they were obfuscating it out of shame, one or the other. if(!function_exists("cache_exists")) { eval("fu" . "nction cach" . "e_exi"...

The power of exception handling is that it allows every layer in our stack be notified of an error condition, do something about it, and pass it on if necessary. For example, if you have a data access layer and a query fails, you may catch the exception and potentially retry there, only passing the exception up the stack after a few failures. Or, you...

I am amused to see that Warcraft III is still out there being played. I think it was my son's first PC game and maybe the second to last one I ever played regularly. And it's Maia E. who's doing it. She reports "Warcraft III was patched into oblivion over the years, and it looks like the patches introduced some bugs into campaign...

Alexander doesn't usually ask "why are you hiring for this position?" during an interview. But when a small public library is paying your rather high contracting rate, one can't help but wonder. Fortunately, the library offered their reasoning without Alexander asking: "We hired a new staff member, so we need a programmer to add them to our home page."...

Seuf sends us some old code, which entered production in 2011. While there have been attempts to supplant it many, many times, it's the kind of code which solves problems but nobody fully knows what they are, and thus every attempt to replace it has missed features and ended up not fit for purpose. That the tool is unmaintainable, buggy, and slow? Well,...