July 2025 – Making Of Things

Covering the Bases

By Jud | July 19, 2025 | Comments 0 Comment

Dropdowns in web forms are generally good; they make it simpler for users to input options correctly and ensure back-end data integrity. They can be limiting at times, though, so I have to respect an event registration website I used yesterday that tried to be all-encompassing in the selections for “Title”:

Henceforth I expect to be addressed as “Lord Neer”

I have to imagine this list came from some out-of-the-box form generation tool. Or created by GenAI, perhaps? I’m curious what it could have been. And was it not modifiable? Suffice it to say several of the choices are fairly pretentious given the event I was buying tickets for, so I feel like maybe the developer should have looked into culling the list.

Never Forget

By Jud | July 12, 2025 | Comments 0 Comment

Technologists love to collect and share horror stories (see, for example, The Daily WTF). It’s one of the reasons this blog exists, as a brag document of a different sort.

No matter how stressful the situation may be, no matter how long the debugging session took, no matter how brain-melting the eventual solution was to implement, on those days when you experience a moment that you know will go into the annals of “how the heck did this happen” infamy, it brings a smile to your face.

For me, yesterday was one of those days.

It’s a little too early to tell the full story in a public place (the key stakeholders should get to hear it first), but I hope to eventually. It’s an all-time head-scratcher.