3 ms·
Ask HN: What are some ridiculous dev stories? I'm collecting for a book
I am working on writing a free book that is collection of ridiculous programing stories.
I thought HN would be a great place to fish for stories.
If you are interested in sharing a story you can respond to this thread with the story or send me an email: zohar.jackson+stories@gmail.com
Obviously all stories will be professionally edited and wont be published until receiving permission from original writer.
Looking forward!
- carapace 8y agoI worked at a company that has a flagship product that is a web-based spreadsheet. The company uses huge spreadsheets to manage their network infrastructure. These spreadsheets are so large that their own flagship web-based spreadsheet cannot handle them, so there's a whole section of the company running Excel on Windows workstations to manage them. I worked on a replacement project for that. It was also a web-based spreadsheet. It was about three years old when I joined the project and I worked on it for two more years (before quitting.) Punchline: It also could not handle the large spreadsheets. (Sad truth: tens of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of dev-hours wasted with zero payoff. PMs getting promoted up and out and leaving the project behind resulted in a classic "Lava Flow"[1] mess. You could actually see the layers in the code and VCS.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava_flow_(programming) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava_flow_(programming)