3 ms·

Everything is always critical to the person making the feature request. The trick is to ask them to order their tickets by asking which ones they need first.

x0x0 11y ago
Oh trust me, we tried. Even when he would order them, he demanded them all to be done. It was fundamentally inconceivable to this person, and to the founder who was relatively unfamiliar with software, that software can take time. And what is hard often isn't obvious to someone who isn't an engineer. They did shit -- and the memories are coming back! -- like build multiple versions of the hardware that fixed different problems. Guess what they didn't do? Create any fucking way to query from the computer side what version of hardware you were talking to. Until rev 8 or 9. I spent probably a cumulative month figuring out (usually) non-destructive ways to guess from different faults which version of hardware a computer was talking to. And there was fun stuff like the servo motor with no hardware stop (used to move a lens closer/further from a laser) and different gearing ratios on different revs that could do $10-$20k of damage to lenses if you didn't know exactly what you were talking to. Because all you told the motor was degrees to rotate the shaft, but the aforementioned different gearing meant you could ram a lens into a laser because later revs traveled 3x as far per rotation. One thing that solved lots and lots of problems for us was I finally harangued the ceo into just shipping our own computers with the machines. We used nidaq cards to acquire data; nothing was as fun as attempting to remotely figure out driver conflicts/issues or NI licensing issues or what to do when someone didn't buy the right type of card. Often with a not particularly computer literate bio grad student on the other end. Just shipping our own computer with daq and software pre-installed and refusing to support anything but our own computers ($600 dells) got rid of a class of problems and replaced them with just one: the NIDaq card was jarred out of its slot during shipping. Reseat it. Or eventually, have the factory screw it in then glue it to the motherboard.

x0x0 11y ago

Oh trust me, we tried. Even when he would order them, he demanded them all to be done. It was fundamentally inconceivable to this person, and to the founder who was relatively unfamiliar with software, that software can take time. And what is hard often isn't obvious to someone who isn't an engineer. They did shit -- and the memories are coming back! -- like build multiple versions of the hardware that fixed different problems. Guess what they didn't do? Create any fucking way to query from the computer side what version of hardware you were talking to. Until rev 8 or 9. I spent probably a cumulative month figuring out (usually) non-destructive ways to guess from different faults which version of hardware a computer was talking to. And there was fun stuff like the servo motor with no hardware stop (used to move a lens closer/further from a laser) and different gearing ratios on different revs that could do $10-$20k of damage to lenses if you didn't know exactly what you were talking to. Because all you told the motor was degrees to rotate the shaft, but the aforementioned different gearing meant you could ram a lens into a laser because later revs traveled 3x as far per rotation. One thing that solved lots and lots of problems for us was I finally harangued the ceo into just shipping our own computers with the machines. We used nidaq cards to acquire data; nothing was as fun as attempting to remotely figure out driver conflicts/issues or NI licensing issues or what to do when someone didn't buy the right type of card. Often with a not particularly computer literate bio grad student on the other end. Just shipping our own computer with daq and software pre-installed and refusing to support anything but our own computers ($600 dells) got rid of a class of problems and replaced them with just one: the NIDaq card was jarred out of its slot during shipping. Reseat it. Or eventually, have the factory screw it in then glue it to the motherboard.