Tales from the Office

Clearly we must not use the results of a particular piece of code too often or for anything too important because today I found a bug that has been there for weeks. (Not my code. My bugs are far more catastrophic.)

We ran out of cake. Lots of people baked over the weekend and brought cakes in on Monday. But it was barely enough cake for a day and a half.

The candy jar is full of the sort of candy that destroys dental work. Normally I love candy, but I will be rocking this temporary crown for at least another week, so I had to pass on the candy.

One of our homework problems involves a character named Pythagoras making lentil soup. A student used the bug report feature to inform us: “In Pythogoras’s diet he was not allowed to eat beans.”

Another bug report ended with: “I am very mad at you! From, parents.” We suspect that it was not actually the parents who sent this.

Starting on a new project today. The previous project could have ended up becoming a deep dive into sophisticated machine learning techniques, but instead I was able to get things good enough for now with straightforward heuristics. I don’t want to talk too much about what we were working on, but this gives you a sense of the flavor of our solution: If a new user has the characters “69” in his username and then makes more than one post on the message board within the first hour of creating the account, then it is worth checking to see if the account is violating any of the rules of our site.