6 ms·

The first contract program I wrote was when I was 17 years old. I was working at a service station changing oil. Some guy comes through who wants to stand aroun

The first contract program I wrote was when I was 17 years old. I was working at a service station changing oil. Some guy comes through who wants to stand around while I do the work (it happens) so we struck up a conversation. Turns out he was a bookkeeper and had just purchased an Apple IIe and wanted to use it for his clients. I knew nothing about accounting, he knew nothing about computers, so it seemed like a good match :) Four weeks of spending free afternoons at his shop, and it was ready to go. He was happy and I had 200 bucks in my pocket. Life was good. Almost 20 years later, I get a call from him. He says the program isn't working so well and he wants to upgrade. I'm like WTF? Does anybody in the universe still even have a working Apple II anymore? Why would he keep using something like that for 20 years? He told me that as computers modernized, it became a bit of a status symbol to have an older-looking system spewing out reams of reports. His customers, who were mostly small construction companies and such, got the feeling of stability and security from something that was unchanged. It is a very strange feeling to get a call about code you wrote a long, long time ago. If I would have had any sense, I would have realized from the experience that programming is normally an extremely tiny part of actually making a business work. But it took me many more years to figure that one out.

scottmagdalein 14y ago
one-up
- scottmagdalein 14y ago
  This was a joke. :(
perfunctory 14y ago
Stories like these make me think that the whole software industry is a huge conspiracy theory :) Thanks for sharing
ajuc 14y ago
My uncle works at helicopter factory nearby as technician, part of his job is to maintain old database that keep temperature readings from meters inside some oven for making plastic parts (hull, etc). The system works on old PC with MS-DOS, and database is in clipper. I think the system works for at least 15 years already.
ryandetzel 14y ago
Wow...
motoford 14y ago
Upvote for the story and for the last paragraph realization. Unfortunately many in our industry still don't understand that.
untog 14y ago
I have a similar story. Fresh out of college (in a non-computing related discipline) I went to work as a temp for a gas pipelining company. Their data entry system was obscenely awful- an Access database that was used like an Excel spreadsheet- entering in the same data over and over again in different forms. So, I optimised it. Added some forms. Made report templates that printed out automatically. Eventually I stretched the limits of Access and turned it into a full VB.NET (shudder) application. I tried to get the IT department involved but they refused to have anything to do with it- I couldn't even install Visual Studio Express because I didn't have admin rights on my machine- I had to use SharpDevelop. All this happened while I was still an "administrative assistant" on a temp wage. After a time, I left- it was time, and in any case they'd said that my work was going to be replaced by an integrated SAP solution that would span the entire company's workflow. I moved on, got a much better job and have been programming off the back of that original job ever since. This was in 2006. I spoke to a former co-worker for the first time in years about six months ago, who told me to my jaw dropping surprise that they were still running my application. Aside from anything else, I was blown away that the thing still worked. There's a certain morbid curiosity that makes me want to look at the code I wrote back then, I'm sure I would cringe. But hey, it's still going.
- Flow 14y ago
  There's nothing as permanent as a temporary solution. :-D
  - dneb7 14y ago
    This is one of the biggest things I'm grateful my mentor drilled into me: Never make a quick and dirty solution that anyone else (especially management!) sees -- it will become the final solution.
    - erikb 14y ago
      You know, the great thing about learning is that everything you learn turns out wrong. And after that the next thing will be that you learn that it's wrong that it's wrong. And so on. So guess what, you will probably learn next that quick and dirty is an amazing thing. Sometimes the morbid, buggy stuff is exactly what's needed and a well designed solution wouldn't scale to it's task or wouldn't be used because it's so clean.
kds 14y ago
How did he manage to find you after 20 years?
- dangrossman 14y ago
  Phone number portability.
- troels 14y ago
  Looked up his name in the phone book, I assume.
dasil003 14y ago
Your story immediately conjured up an image of Steve Martin in The Jerk.
lifeisstillgood 14y ago
Actually the lesson to learn is charge monthly subscriptions. Actually that's a little unfair. The thing is these are businesses where (presumably) vital parts are left to fester. I presume because the management 'dont get it', but every business has these corner cases, and odd parts. I think the foolishness of ERP was ever daring to dream it could be solved monolithically. THe future surely is a form of SOA where some guy in accounting can write a crappy service, authenticate it globally and plug it into the enterprise directory system. But this really assumes everyone working will be able to program. Just like we assume everyone at work can read.
btilly 14y ago
I know someone who went to work for a small company in the early 70s and among other things wrote a cron job in PL/1. She came back to the same company 30 years later in a much more senior position. And out of curiosity checked to see if any of her old code was still there. She found that cron job she had written in a language that she no longer knew and found that it had never been touched. She asked why not, and was told it never broke. Unfortunately that company imploded in the mortgage crisis, so her code is probably no longer running.
- trafficlight 14y ago
  That's gotta be a good feeling. Knowing something you wrote has worked flawlessly for 3 decades, even if it is something trivial.
billforsternz 14y ago
Loved your story. And because it's what we do here, I'll mention my best similar war story. I created a bowling alley scoring system in, I think, 1990. It was basically an embedded system, using commodity PCs (one PC per two lanes) networked together with a master PC running another one of my programs as a check-in and control console. I used Turbo C V2 I think it was, with my own home rolled DOS windowing library of the kind that was ubiquitous at the time. Basically it was a smell-of-an-oily-rag development for a friend of mine who had taken over a near derelict 20 lane bowling alley and was upgrading it from "manual" scoring to "computer" scoring but couldn't afford a 100K "automatic" scoring system from Brunswick or the other big player (can't remember their name). Anyway, it was a successful and fun project, but after 8 years or so the bowling alley was gutted by fire. Years later I was travelling through a small provincial town and saw a 10 pin bowling alley. Something told me to stop the car and go in. What do you know, there was my whole system, lanes plus controller, running a small 8 lane setup. Talking to the guy (potentially a mistake, what if he wanted after sales service :- ) it transpired he'd bought the equipment in the (literal) fire sale and figured out how to hook up the network and get it all going. He'd even split it in two and got it running another system in another nearby town. I was seriously impressed that he'd managed that actually.
- tjic 14y ago
  > Something told me to stop the car and go in. I am a rationalist and have no truck in telepathy, crystals, or other such related craziness. Coincidence and the law of large numbers explains everything. ...but once in a blue moon I hear a story like this and do have a niggling thought: maybe the universe is much deeper and weirder than we think. And/or the grad students who are running the simulation we all exist in like to play tricks on us from time to time. ;-)
  - dllthomas 14y ago
    Law of large numbers. We also don't know how many other bowling alleys he's gone into - he presumably likes bowling.
    - 14y ago
philjones88 14y ago
My story: Whilst on a university placement doing some web coding and databases work, the guy in the office next to me was having real problems with his website. Being curious, I asked for the URL and took a look. A classic ASP and Access database powered website that was probably held together by bubblegum. He had outsourced the work to a Chinese company because they were cheaper than UK based companies (important point for later). The site was full of every web security hole known. Mainly lots and lots of SQL injection holes. He asked if I could fix the pile of garbage and I honestly couldn't, I don't like rewriting but when its an old (this was 3 years ago) tech with no English comments and their code quality zero, copy pasting everything. So in the evenings and weekends for a month I rewrote it to ASP.NET MVC (1.0, latest at the time) and SQL Server. I got him to select a template off Themeforest for $15 that I reworked slightly (and badly, I'm not a designer). He is happy, I am happy with £500 for my work. I finish my placement and go back to university but came back to my placement for another year to do a startup idea. He had moved offices and we have very little contact. After finishing university and 2 years later, I join a "Soul Destroying Corp" (not the one you are thinking of) and decide that isn't what I want to do with my life, so I setup my business and tell him that I'm now doing my own thing and looking for clients. Turns out my weekend/evening £500 website generated him around £500,000+ in revenue (not profit) and his business grew from just him to 5 people. All his sales leads came through the website. From September last year till now, I have rewritten it and we are automating more of his "manual" (lots of Word, Excel and paper) to be totally automated or a few mouse clicks. Wow, when I think back, that website was terrible but it worked well for 2 years and grew his business. Huge ROI for him but now he is paying me back by hiring me to rewrite/automate more of his business.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

scottmagdalein 14y ago

one-up

scottmagdalein 14y ago
This was a joke. :(

perfunctory 14y ago

Stories like these make me think that the whole software industry is a huge conspiracy theory :) Thanks for sharing

ajuc 14y ago

My uncle works at helicopter factory nearby as technician, part of his job is to maintain old database that keep temperature readings from meters inside some oven for making plastic parts (hull, etc). The system works on old PC with MS-DOS, and database is in clipper. I think the system works for at least 15 years already.

ryandetzel 14y ago

Wow...

motoford 14y ago

Upvote for the story and for the last paragraph realization. Unfortunately many in our industry still don't understand that.

untog 14y ago

I have a similar story. Fresh out of college (in a non-computing related discipline) I went to work as a temp for a gas pipelining company. Their data entry system was obscenely awful- an Access database that was used like an Excel spreadsheet- entering in the same data over and over again in different forms. So, I optimised it. Added some forms. Made report templates that printed out automatically. Eventually I stretched the limits of Access and turned it into a full VB.NET (shudder) application. I tried to get the IT department involved but they refused to have anything to do with it- I couldn't even install Visual Studio Express because I didn't have admin rights on my machine- I had to use SharpDevelop. All this happened while I was still an "administrative assistant" on a temp wage. After a time, I left- it was time, and in any case they'd said that my work was going to be replaced by an integrated SAP solution that would span the entire company's workflow. I moved on, got a much better job and have been programming off the back of that original job ever since. This was in 2006. I spoke to a former co-worker for the first time in years about six months ago, who told me to my jaw dropping surprise that they were still running my application. Aside from anything else, I was blown away that the thing still worked. There's a certain morbid curiosity that makes me want to look at the code I wrote back then, I'm sure I would cringe. But hey, it's still going.

Flow 14y ago
There's nothing as permanent as a temporary solution. :-D
- dneb7 14y ago
  This is one of the biggest things I'm grateful my mentor drilled into me: Never make a quick and dirty solution that anyone else (especially management!) sees -- it will become the final solution.
  - erikb 14y ago
    You know, the great thing about learning is that everything you learn turns out wrong. And after that the next thing will be that you learn that it's wrong that it's wrong. And so on. So guess what, you will probably learn next that quick and dirty is an amazing thing. Sometimes the morbid, buggy stuff is exactly what's needed and a well designed solution wouldn't scale to it's task or wouldn't be used because it's so clean.

kds 14y ago

How did he manage to find you after 20 years?

dangrossman 14y ago
Phone number portability.
troels 14y ago
Looked up his name in the phone book, I assume.

dasil003 14y ago

Your story immediately conjured up an image of Steve Martin in The Jerk.

lifeisstillgood 14y ago

Actually the lesson to learn is charge monthly subscriptions. Actually that's a little unfair. The thing is these are businesses where (presumably) vital parts are left to fester. I presume because the management 'dont get it', but every business has these corner cases, and odd parts. I think the foolishness of ERP was ever daring to dream it could be solved monolithically. THe future surely is a form of SOA where some guy in accounting can write a crappy service, authenticate it globally and plug it into the enterprise directory system. But this really assumes everyone working will be able to program. Just like we assume everyone at work can read.

btilly 14y ago

I know someone who went to work for a small company in the early 70s and among other things wrote a cron job in PL/1. She came back to the same company 30 years later in a much more senior position. And out of curiosity checked to see if any of her old code was still there. She found that cron job she had written in a language that she no longer knew and found that it had never been touched. She asked why not, and was told it never broke. Unfortunately that company imploded in the mortgage crisis, so her code is probably no longer running.

trafficlight 14y ago
That's gotta be a good feeling. Knowing something you wrote has worked flawlessly for 3 decades, even if it is something trivial.

billforsternz 14y ago

Loved your story. And because it's what we do here, I'll mention my best similar war story. I created a bowling alley scoring system in, I think, 1990. It was basically an embedded system, using commodity PCs (one PC per two lanes) networked together with a master PC running another one of my programs as a check-in and control console. I used Turbo C V2 I think it was, with my own home rolled DOS windowing library of the kind that was ubiquitous at the time. Basically it was a smell-of-an-oily-rag development for a friend of mine who had taken over a near derelict 20 lane bowling alley and was upgrading it from "manual" scoring to "computer" scoring but couldn't afford a 100K "automatic" scoring system from Brunswick or the other big player (can't remember their name). Anyway, it was a successful and fun project, but after 8 years or so the bowling alley was gutted by fire. Years later I was travelling through a small provincial town and saw a 10 pin bowling alley. Something told me to stop the car and go in. What do you know, there was my whole system, lanes plus controller, running a small 8 lane setup. Talking to the guy (potentially a mistake, what if he wanted after sales service :- ) it transpired he'd bought the equipment in the (literal) fire sale and figured out how to hook up the network and get it all going. He'd even split it in two and got it running another system in another nearby town. I was seriously impressed that he'd managed that actually.

tjic 14y ago
> Something told me to stop the car and go in. I am a rationalist and have no truck in telepathy, crystals, or other such related craziness. Coincidence and the law of large numbers explains everything. ...but once in a blue moon I hear a story like this and do have a niggling thought: maybe the universe is much deeper and weirder than we think. And/or the grad students who are running the simulation we all exist in like to play tricks on us from time to time. ;-)
- dllthomas 14y ago
  Law of large numbers. We also don't know how many other bowling alleys he's gone into - he presumably likes bowling.
  - 14y ago

philjones88 14y ago

My story: Whilst on a university placement doing some web coding and databases work, the guy in the office next to me was having real problems with his website. Being curious, I asked for the URL and took a look. A classic ASP and Access database powered website that was probably held together by bubblegum. He had outsourced the work to a Chinese company because they were cheaper than UK based companies (important point for later). The site was full of every web security hole known. Mainly lots and lots of SQL injection holes. He asked if I could fix the pile of garbage and I honestly couldn't, I don't like rewriting but when its an old (this was 3 years ago) tech with no English comments and their code quality zero, copy pasting everything. So in the evenings and weekends for a month I rewrote it to ASP.NET MVC (1.0, latest at the time) and SQL Server. I got him to select a template off Themeforest for $15 that I reworked slightly (and badly, I'm not a designer). He is happy, I am happy with £500 for my work. I finish my placement and go back to university but came back to my placement for another year to do a startup idea. He had moved offices and we have very little contact. After finishing university and 2 years later, I join a "Soul Destroying Corp" (not the one you are thinking of) and decide that isn't what I want to do with my life, so I setup my business and tell him that I'm now doing my own thing and looking for clients. Turns out my weekend/evening £500 website generated him around £500,000+ in revenue (not profit) and his business grew from just him to 5 people. All his sales leads came through the website. From September last year till now, I have rewritten it and we are automating more of his "manual" (lots of Word, Excel and paper) to be totally automated or a few mouse clicks. Wow, when I think back, that website was terrible but it worked well for 2 years and grew his business. Huge ROI for him but now he is paying me back by hiring me to rewrite/automate more of his business.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]