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This was 15 years ago. I signed up to a correspondence course to study company law after my under graduation(not CS). Was bored so wanted to pick a hobby and wa

This was 15 years ago. I signed up to a correspondence course to study company law after my under graduation(not CS). Was bored so wanted to pick a hobby and was fascinated by robotics/automation. Self thought 8051 by reading Kenneth J. Ajala and this hobby soon turned lucrative. I signed up with an institute which was helping college students with their final year projects. I had a college junior(Amazing guy who is still a buddy) to help me with the pcb fabrication and i would handle the software side. All was well until a project which required a heat sensor and i couldn't source it. My mode of sourcing the chip is via a friend who was in Chennai and i would send the list of items and he would go into Ritchie street and get it for me and mail it. Good old days. Sorry forgot the name of the chip. All i could get was an alternative one with single pin instead of double and it uses a different protocol. I had the alternative chip delivered one day before the girl student's viva voce. Got it working and the examiner took the pain to visit the lab in the institute to examine and conduct the viva voce. Phew. Another incident happened with a company where i was the second technical hire and there was just me and the CTO on tech team. The CTO had a working POC and it was quite a complex product. Even before i could start writing a single line of code the CTO left the company after a spat and without proper hand-off. I wouldn't wish this scenario even upon my worst enemy. It was quite a significant challenge to even get it running. One simple example - In the initial days after he left, i found out Opennebula Virtualbox driver is not attaching the context disk on windows. I had to write a patch in ruby and submit a pull request. I didn't knew ruby and haven't even wrote a single line of ruby code before that. But after quite a struggle - got the code base to start making significant money.

brianpgordon 8y ago
> Even before i could start writing a single line of code the CTO left the company after a spat and without proper hand-off. I wouldn't wish this scenario even upon my worst enemy. I know that feel. My first full-time job right out of college, the lead developer left only a week after I joined. I individually inherited a 70k+ SLOC project (in Java, but still...) of his that sorta kinda worked, in a domain I had no experience in. Especially as a new grad there was a massive amount of anxiety trying to get up to speed with nobody to ask questions to. But as the months went by I learned every nook and cranny of every class in the codebase, and was able to make big sweeping changes. It turned out to be an incredibly valuable lesson in soldiering on and not getting intimidated.
- navinsylvester 8y ago
  I had loads of experience when i encountered the scenario so your story is much more impressive. Agree that the schooling this kind of scenario provides is harsh but an enriching one.

brianpgordon 8y ago

> Even before i could start writing a single line of code the CTO left the company after a spat and without proper hand-off. I wouldn't wish this scenario even upon my worst enemy. I know that feel. My first full-time job right out of college, the lead developer left only a week after I joined. I individually inherited a 70k+ SLOC project (in Java, but still...) of his that sorta kinda worked, in a domain I had no experience in. Especially as a new grad there was a massive amount of anxiety trying to get up to speed with nobody to ask questions to. But as the months went by I learned every nook and cranny of every class in the codebase, and was able to make big sweeping changes. It turned out to be an incredibly valuable lesson in soldiering on and not getting intimidated.

navinsylvester 8y ago
I had loads of experience when i encountered the scenario so your story is much more impressive. Agree that the schooling this kind of scenario provides is harsh but an enriching one.