MichaelRunyon.com – All Things Geek

Jesus and Satan have an argument as to who is the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they come to an agreement to hold a contest with God as the judge. They set themselves before their computers and begin. They type furiously, lines of code streaming up the screen, for several hours straight.

Seconds before the end of the competition, a bolt of lightning strikes, taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over. He asks Satan to show his work. Visibly upset, Satan cries and says, “I have nothing. I lost it all when the power went out.”

“Very well,” says God, “let us see if Jesus has fared any better.”

Jesus presses a key, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers.

Satan is astonished. He stutters, “B-b-but how?! I lost everything, yet Jesus’ program is intact! How did he do it?”

God chuckles, “Everybody knows… Jesus saves.”

—–

From StackOverflow -  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/234075/what-is-your-best-programmer-joke

Now, I hate to go off in a uncontrolled rant about certain aspects of my job without first prefacing my comments with a bit of clarity. I love my job, and especially love my ability to sometimes take a step back and look at the big future. Our clients don’t comprise a massive data set, but we are constantly exposed to new and different circumstances, and though they can sometimes present themselves in an annoying or inconsistent manner, problem solving has always been a great joy of mine, and therefore I do find pleasure in this avenue. Now, on to my subject….

Anyone who has much background in coding user interfaces (this includes web programming, ESPECIALLY web programming) has come to the complete and total understanding that a great deal of their job in creating user interfaces in maintaining the inability of the user to make choices or perform actions that we don’t wish for them to do (or don’t want them to do at that time). In making an interface and it’s controlling component, I spent nearly 80% of my time in restricting and validating user input to ensure that only valid data makes it to the control mechanism, and onward in the guts of the program. Whether it’s ensuring that a user has put in an email address that exists in a valid domain or making certain that a credit card number follows a skeleton guideline of the major credit cards, there are many, many gaps to be plugged to ensure that the user has a smooth and error-free experience. 

Sometimes, however, a smaller project might need to get completed quickly, and cost might prohibit us from completely fleshing out the validation that is typically performed on a certain control. This is not abnormal and certainly not the end of the world. Special circumstances can be accepted for certain circumstances, especially if there is little chance that your good name as the developer can’t be tarnished from the performance of the control, or that very few people will be visiting the application in question. This, however, is a completely stupid assumption, in both cases. Whatever application you end up programming in a half-complete way will eventually find itself in high usage or high visibility, and without proper preparation, you face the end result of both of your assumptions. 

A simple app that was created a few years back for a local company selling gift cards is my case in point. A relatively simple form controls the app. You put in your billing address, the shipping address that the card will be sent to, the name on the card, and a customized message. After these details are complete, you put in your credit card information and then submit it to the server. In the interest of being agile at the outset (a decision that was I not around to make at the time) this form was unprotected in the sense of user validation. There was no client or server side validation to ensure that certain values were present (like a name/address on the card, a credit card number, an expiration year, etc). At first, with relatively little user input, this was not really a problem. If the user encountered a problem, they would see a nasty ColdFusion error and would retreat to the page previous to check their input. Great, in a very savage and basic sense. Teach the user to teach themselves and correct their mistake. 

We, however, live in an age of greater expecatations these days. So after sitting in this unprotected state for a long time and being un-examined by the application, it was time to give this little app some love. When the form was setup, I was designated as a “watcher”, meaning that I got a copy of every single output of the form. Every time someone submitted the form without an error, I got a copy. What became amazing to me over time was how many times someone could screw up the form before they got it right and got their confirmation message. A user would fill out the form with just their name and the name of the person they wanted to send a gift card to and then hit submit. And the system would let them. And then, in a minute, when a message confirming their input did not come through, they would go back and do the same over and over again. Eventually they would put in an address. A few more submits and then a credit card number. And then a gift card amount. Sometimes, I would get 13 submits from the same person before acceptable input was gathered. Often times, the sales reps at the company would just call the person or try to email them, to avoid further input on their part. 

The worst examples of this, however, were the weekly or monthly persons that would click the empty form 20 times in a short time. They would follow the website link that said “Send a Gift Card” and then just click “Send Card” at the bottom of the form over and over again, completely ignoring the 20 or so user fields to put information in. When validation was eventually put into the form, a control mechanism that prevented this was set to log this behavior just out of curiosity and it in no way stopped. Let me be clear about this….hundreds of people were going to a website that presented them with a form to put in some basic information about how to send a gift card, and then just clicked away, willing the computer to try and understand that they wished a gift card to be sent to their aunt/uncle/father/son/daughter, address, name, amount and wishes unknown. 

I break down when trying to resolve these circumstances. It’s like playing whack-a-mole on a global scale. I finally get the form so that users MUST provide input for essential fields and think that will be the end of it. But then someone puts in “Visa” where it says “Credit Card Number”. Then, you have to go back and limit the input to numbers only. Then you have to go back and limit the input to known credit card formats. Then you have to autofill the city and state from the zipcode, since users will so often put the wrong city and state on their form. And on, and on, and on. 

So, to wrap this up shortly….when you browse the Internet and fill out forms to send money to someone, or order something from a website, or to see certain data from a source….remember that many hours were put into that application to ensure that you and all of the other stupid people out there can’t blindly click around in hopes of their thoughts being transmitted to the server. And hopefully you will appreciate the effort the next time. 

There. Take the soapbox away. 

I am certainly not the first to make the clever pun of referring to whatever addictive object or concept that rhymes (in any way) with Crack as such (Blackberry/Crackberry, World of Warcraft/World of WarCrack, etc). How juvenile…:) But to say that StackOverlow is akin to CrackOverflow would be an understatement.

Crack, er, StackOverflow was released as a private beta from the creators of Coding Horror and Joel on Software (Jeff Atwood and Joel Sposky, respectively) about 6 weeks ago. I joined the private beta pool (which was by request/invitation only) about 3 weeks ago, and found the site to be a great idea, if the original users were a bit caustic (very picky about staying within the realm of realized discussion and answers). However, the endless searching of topics that you know about or want to know about quickly rose the site to the level of Wikipedia for me. To clarify this point, let me explain…

I love information. I love to study data, read it, extrapolate it, make judgements, etc. It’s little surprise that I chose my current profession (web developer/programmer) given this analysis, as I primarily work with data, often creating reports, etc. Wikipedia is perhaps the largest and complete source of interlinked information ever (save the entirety of the Internet), and one can get lost in its vast caverns of subjective and interesting information. I have put in mental stopgaps to prevent me from blowing an entire afternoon reading about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge or the frictional density of osmium, as Wikipedia would be glad to instruct you about.

StackOverflow is quickly becoming a programming/development specific source like that. There are already 12,000+ questions on the site, some with hundreds of answers. It’s a mass collaboration of those who share a like profession (and sometimes, mindset), and their collective knowledge of whatever subject is being discussed. Not only are you drawn into the site to find some question to answer your problem, but you also feel drawn to help others find the answer to their problems via the information that you know. A great deal of the time, there is no clear answer, and the questioner is left to decide for his/herself what the best and most plausible answer is.

I’m not particularly inclined to seek out questioners who I think can benefit from my answers, but I don’t deny that there is a good feeling when a question/answer is well-liked by the community. With a community that appears to be as talented and professional well developed as StackOverlow seems, that kind of rapport helps to keep one from feeling totally isolated, as is often a common consequence of solo developers.

Unsuprisingly, there are not that many question regarding Coldfusion, as Jeff and Joel’s audience tends to be more .NET/PHP developers. Not that it bothers me that much anyway, as I don’t consider myself to be a totally Coldfusion developer. I attempt to remain fluent in as many languages as possible, though some of the core ideas of some of the languages keep this possibility from being easier than it is.

That said, I have thus far found StackOverflow to be a better source than simple Googling in many of the less definitive questions, ones that warrant discussion by the members. This is particularly interesting, in that one of the stated purposes of the site is to become a definitive, searchable source of information, much like a wiki, where one can take their searchable problem.

So, a word to the wise…stay away from StackOverlow. Keep doing your job or learning about other things, not on the Internet. Keep me and the other information addicts safely away, lest you get sucked in yourself.