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Question: Why does some of the product source code look like it is the output of a decompiler? Answer: Our office was in the WTC and was destroyed on 9/11. Luc
by skissane 3y ago
Question: Why does some of the product source code look like it is the output of a decompiler?
Answer: Our office was in the WTC and was destroyed on 9/11. Luckily everyone got out alive, but then we discovered we had no off-site backups of the source code. In order to continue development, we had to retrieve the released binaries from our customers and decompile them to get back source code.
- fransje26 3y agoOh.. Ouch, ouch, ouch. I feel for you. That must have been hell.
- skissane 3y agoI wasn’t there for 9/11, my involvement with that code base started a few years later. But it was clear it was a traumatic memory for colleagues who had been
- guappa 3y agoI see this as a case of: "see, allowing wfh would have saved you there."
- skissane 3y agoFrom what I was told, WFH and people starting late actually really helped, in that there were only a handful of people physically in the office when it happened. But apparently the server with the source code on it was in it too. I don’t know if they forgot about off-site backups entirely, or if they thought they had them but only discovered they were incomplete or faulty afterwards I don't know what the practice was at that time, but some years later, people weren't allowed to have the source on their laptops, they had to SSH/RDP/etc in to a hosted development system to work on it, which might explain how losing the office resulted in losing the source code even with people doing WFH
- bluGill 3y agoNo it wouldn't have - 2001 was 4 years before distributed version control. Work from home might have had current copies of some branches checked out on local machines, but nobody would have had full history or code from release branches on their machine.