1. Pour Mountain Dew onto your shirt (as a sugary adhesive) and then cover yourself in crushed Doritos, proclaiming to be the crumbs in a coworker’s keyboard.
2. Create a noose from some spare cable and put it around your neck. When somebody asks what you are, state that you are the [fill in blank] server that’s always hanging for no good reason.
3. Find that one guy in your office with anime figures and steal a few of them from his elevated shelf. Then, paint their faces with printer ink and walk around with them, boldly announcing to be the proud parent process of several zombie children. (Avoid the actual owner of the figures for the entire duration of the party.)
4. Print out three copies of a cute puppy’s face found on the Internet, align them in a row, and tape them to your head. Afterwards, create a collar from a network cable and attach a large name tag which says “Kerberos the Happy Scrappy Hero Authentication“.
5. Empty one of your rectangular wastebaskets, draw the face of a demon on its side, and don it on your head to parade around as a corrupted USB stick.
6. If you and a fellow programmer are feeling a little adventurous, create a ‘cat-o-nine tails’ from the spare mice in the hardware closet and create a spiked paper collar using paper and staples. Now, with one person wielding the tails and with one person wearing the collar, be the sensation of your event by attending as a MongoDB master and slave configuration.

Peter Bolton is the author of Blowing the Bridge: A Software Story and has also been known to be a grumpy bastard on occasion.

It’s my personal preference to incentivize fellow developers, in order to truly get the best out of them…but when funds are scarce or when personalities are too strong, draconian measures must be put in place. (Sometimes, it just makes sense to replace cash with pain as the currency to dole out.) However, to be fair, there should be some code of conduct, since it wouldn’t be just to not have a proper system installed. So, here are some proposed punishments that match their dirty deeds:

Crime: Using string concatenation to create SQL, instead of using prepared statements or other similar frameworks/data structures.
Punishment: Be forced to build a chair from moldy wood and rusted nails while blindfolded and then to work from that chair for a year.

Crime: Going on vacation to another part of the world for several weeks and forgetting to commit your code before leaving.
Punishment: Building security will occasionally “forget” that you are an employee, and assuming that you are a domestic terrorist, they will tackle you and blast you in the face with pepper spray.

Crime: Immediately shirking blame and rejecting the claim of a bug in your code, even without hearing the evidence. (Even worse, not apologizing for your behavior when your code is actually found to be the cause.)
Punishment (First Offense): Find the dirtiest computer mouse in the department and be forced to keep it in your mouth for an entire day.
Punishment (Second Offense): Find the dirtiest computer mouse in the department and be forced to hold it in your ass for an entire day.
Punishment (Third Offense): 2nd offense punishment, followed immediately by 1st offense punishment.

Crime: Knowing that a reliable library already exists with desired functionality and writing your own anyway, even though a deadline is approaching.
Punishment: For the next year of your life, you will be required to maintain legacy, never-reusable COBOL code from 1979. More importantly, you will be required to work (and sweat your ass off) inside the VMS machine that currently executes the program, and you will be required to wear the polyester suit of the original programmer while working.

Crime: Putting the majority of your program’s logic and flow inside a database stored procedure, instead of inside your actual application.
Punishment: For your next project, a wall will be placed between you and your computer, and you can only touch your keyboard and mouse via a pair of glory holes. Most of the time, you will only come into contact with your equipment, but occasionally, you’ll encounter “the equipment” of someone else…which may then require a handjob in order to push your next code changes to Github.

Peter Bolton is the author of Blowing the Bridge: A Software Story and has also been known to be a grumpy bastard on occasion.

After already introducing a measurement standard for compression and giving us a mathematical treatise on mass stimulation, the show Silicon Valley can already be considered as productively prolific, in addition to being hilariously comedic. Obviously, the show is capable of giving us so much more, and we should challenge them to surpass their own past achievements. So, I think I speak for all of us when I say that we expect at least one of the following challenges to be met by the end of the second season:

1. To create the general specifications for the firmware of a “companion” robot being built by Jian, that will possess both the AI needed to pass the Lovelace test and the kinematic equations needed to pass the Linda Lovelace test.
2. To prototype the first online bartering system and bartering message protocol, which Erlich will build for use in his new (and legal) business project WeedNeed (where people will exchange old mobile phones for drone-delivered marijuana).
3. To develop (and then open source) a script utility that will allow you to create a customized set of VRF tables and DNS entries, which Gilfoyle will then use to create and traceroute a poem about how much Dinesh is gay for his code.
4. To invent an accepted scoring system for the static code analysis of Java (probably by Dinesh), in which a minimum score of 90 will get you one free turn with Jian’s new “companion” robot.
5. To create a simple package for script kiddies that exploits CVE-2014-6271, which Gilfoyle uses to replace the home page for JQuery with a picture of monkeys masturbating.

6. To roughly outline a new method for software development called The Starving Startup, in which different planning stages of the business are devised at different levels of hunger and isolation of the designers. (Jared had an epiphany for this idea during his latest sabbatical.)
7. To create an accurate measurement standard for image recognition, that will benchmark Hooli’s new IR system as it attempts to censor the Mad Bomber (who photobombs popular restaurant cams with his penis in hot dog buns).

Peter Bolton is the author of Blowing the Bridge: A Software Story and has also been known to be a grumpy bastard on occasion.

Some software stacks, like LAMP, flourished…and others, well, they just didn’t make the grade.

FLUKE
Facebook, LUa, and KErberos

WASTE
Google Wave, ASP, Sparrow, Truecrypt, and Encarta

FAPPY
Flat files, APache, and PYthon

HYPESS
Hadoop, Yo, PErl, Swift, and a Segway

SCHEET
Scala, a CHange purse, Java EE, and Tomcat

FAIL
F#, Access, IIS, and Longhorn

NOBJOB
NOde.js, BLOBs, JQuery, and some Oracle Bloatware

GOALONG
GO, AnguLarJS, Offers, Nest API, and Google Maps

Peter Bolton is the author of Blowing the Bridge: A Software Story and has also been known to be a grumpy bastard on occasion.

Peter Bolton is the author of Blowing the Bridge: A Software Story and has also been known to be a grumpy bastard on occasion.

Any U.S. citizen can describe the awful experiences which accompany the use of a DMV (or, in some relevant cases, a post office). The minutes or hours of waiting in a line, the callous cackle of laughter of a pensioned employee doing nothing in a back room, the complete apathy behind the counter, the ambient despair hanging in the air…these are the hallmarks of its routine service. However, I would still rather wait in the line of a DMV than pursue another elaborate web development project…for, at the very least, there is still a shroud of humanity left in the husk of a DMV, even if it’s barely clinging to the inside like the placental tissue of a pumpkin. I wonder, though, if we were to apply the tools and norms of web development to the DMV…it might look a little something like this:

• Debugging: As you walk into the lobby of the DMV, you swing the door a bit too quickly, causing the hinge to be pulled out of the door’s frame. Some of the DMV employees give you paper clips and a stapler in order to repair it. In order to be a good sport, you give it a half-hearted try, and when that doesn’t work, the DMV staff understand the futility of it. Instead, they tell you to come back later; they have concluded that the whole DMV office needs to be closed indefinitely, since it will need to be rebuilt entirely.
• Error-Handling: Later, when you approach the counter and ask for a change-of-location form, the clerk just stands there. The clerk could correct your mistake and inform you that it’s a change-of-address form, not a change-of-location form…but instead, the clerk just stands there and looks back at you.
• Browser Compatibility: When you approach the counter about renewing your license, they inform you that the process involves interacting with several different people: a photographer, a clerk, and a test administrator. However, for each different person, you will need to change outfits, speak a different language, and rearrange the furniture in the room to his/her preference.
• Lack of Online Help: While attempting to actually renew the license, you are defenestrated from the second floor by the test administrator (despite wearing a blue shirt, speaking Turkish, and pointing all the chairs to the southwest). When you ask other DMV attendees for their advice on how to resolve this problem, each one has a different answer, but none of them actually help you.
• Using WordPress: Frustrated with your trips to the DMV, you finally give up and hire Toonces the Driving Cat. At first, everything works perfectly, as you only ask him to drive you to work and back home. However, when you ask him to take a different route one day, he quickly starts to become frustrated, and in a state of panic, he drives the both of you off a nearby cliff, where you both perish in a mass of twisted metal.

Peter Bolton is the author of Blowing the Bridge: A Software Story and has also been known to be a grumpy bastard on occasion.