4 ms·

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

252 points by vinhnx 9mo ago

zahlman 9mo ago
> With a single jump to the processor's reset entry point, I had somehow inspired someone to step back from academic competition in order to have more fun with learning. Seems like it wasn't just the processor that reset.
- tommica 9mo ago
  Would love to hear the persons own story! What did they think? What happened afterwards? Where are they now?
arcfour 9mo ago
> At that point, the telecom carrier's representative intervened and bluntly told the set-top box representative to just shut up. This got a laugh out of me. The whole scenario was both hilarious and surreal from start to finish. It's a wonder what people get hung up on sometimes, even if getting hung up on it makes them look bad.
- MBCook 9mo ago
  All the STB guy had to say was that there was no way to get it smooth enough on real hardware. Instead he made himself look like an idiot. Great article.
  - elmomle 9mo ago
    Like many people in the working world, he likely knew his company's policy but did not consider it important to know the reason, only to stand by the policy.
    - kcexn 9mo ago
      They should have known better. It was their job to sell the box. Instead they wasted a tonne of their clients money on a proof-of-concept for something that was never going to work. Using the word 'impossible' was probably also a big error. If it can perform computations, nothing is impossible, but some things are certainly not recommended.
      - pvtmert 9mo ago
        Probably they mentioned something like: "Not possible with current hardware speed" just to be translated as "impossible" since the recollection is second-hand.
        tommica 9mo ago
        Doubt it, the team lead seemed technical enough that they would have picked that detail up.
1123581321 9mo ago
These were great. It’s certainly a blessing and curse to no longer dazzle people when solving a tech puzzle as a middle-aged person. I’m hoping I’ll become impressive again if I can still do it when I’m elderly. :)
jacquesm 9mo ago
> The installer, written in Python, often failed because of incorrect assumptions about the target environment and almost always required some manual intervention to complete successfully. Nothing ever changes. I spent half a day just getting some SDR development stuff to work just now, long live Python code with baked in hard dependencies on particular versions of obscure libraries... In the end it worked, but what a mess.
- alexjplant 9mo ago
  I've worked at a place or three where development environment setup took the better part of two days. Sometimes it was due to shitty proprietary software that nobody had bothered to automate the installation and configuration of. Other times it was due to an accumulation of crufty half-abandoned OSS projects with shell script glue liberally applied to hold it all together. In virtually all cases these environments would break randomly every few months and lead to unnecessary dev downtime. One place I worked decided that it'd be easier to build an AMI and provision quasi-ephemeral EC2 instances to developers instead of putting the time in to pare down the landfill of dev dependencies they had. This whole process was, of course, orchestrated by a custom CLI that would itself randomly break in odd ways. Fun times.
  - reactordev 9mo ago
    I got let go once because they didn’t have setup instructions and hardcoded their own paths into scripts and things that “worked on their machine”. The reason they gave was “Unable to perform basic environment setup”. Some people are just born stupid.
    - collingreen 9mo ago
      Roughly this happened to me once. Got a horrible review after doing what I felt was a heros effort. I'll skip the details but the cherry on top was "you did all this work but it didnt build on the cloud server so we're not going to count it for anything" - the "cloud server" (of the live project) was the ctos laptop and it could only build his local stuff (you could even see the local paths in the web output). As if that wasn't enough, literally all he had to do was git pull and it would have all the new work on it. Cto was eventually fired for trying to steal the company IP and he went on to fail upward making a security camera company infra famously insecure and got a ton of very valuable stock for it. Life is weird!
latenightcoding 9mo ago
working in software before LLMs, you had to be there.
Luker88 9mo ago
for devops I highly recommend Davide Bianchi's "tales from the machine room". https://www.soft-land.org/cgi-bin/doc.pl?mode=setpreferredlanguage&language=en https://www.soft-land.org/cgi-bin/doc.pl?mode=setpreferredla...
cyode 9mo ago
> I could never register susam.com for myself though. That domain was always used by some business selling Turkish cuisines. Looks like the .com is for sale, in case you didn’t notice. https://sedo.com/search/?keyword=Susam.com https://sedo.com/search/?keyword=Susam.com You could probably acquire it (for less than asking price IMO) if you have a sentimental attachment. Nothing wrong with your .net, of course. Thanks for sharing the stories.
Yash16 9mo ago
[dead]
lubujackson 9mo ago
"You don't know what MITM attacks are? Well learn quick." I miss the days of having confidence in people to fill the gaps to do their job. Now we demand junior engineers to system design Twitter and memorize algo tricks for leetcode tests. These were useless measures before, hopefully LLMs finally kill them off for good.
- davidmurdoch 9mo ago
  > LLMs finally kill them off for good Juniors?
  - idiotsecant 9mo ago
    No, humans
- paulddraper 9mo ago
  Now we have people who only do front end or only backend development. Only React or only Go.
tombert 9mo ago
I got a similar start actually. When I was in third grade, there was a scholastic book fair that was selling the book "Make Your Own Web Page! A Guide for Kids"[1]. The internet for nine year old me was this mysterious, opaque thing; I had no idea that you could just "make" a web page. I'm not sure I know what I thought it was, but I guess I assumed it was reserved for businesses or something, and I didn't realize it was something that a kid could do if they wanted to. It wasn't terribly expensive so I asked my mom and she bought it for me. I read through it and was immediately hooked. I know HTML isn't a "programming language", but in my nine year old mind I felt like some uber-hacker writing code and seeing it render on the screen made me feel so cool. It didn't hurt that the internet was still novel enough (~1999-2000) that my third grade teacher was extremely impressed that I did this by myself after I presented it to class for show and tell, and she actually called my parents to tell them how impressed she was. Later I got into proper programming with a bootleg copy of "Sams Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours" [2], a book on ActionScript I had found at Goodwill to use with a pirated copy of Flash MX 2004, and a C++ book that I got for my birthday one year. I eventually became reasonably ok at software stuff and I've built a decent career out of it. I actually tracked down a copy of that original "Make Your Own Web Page!" on eBay and read through it again about two years ago, and while the HTML in there is dated and it's not terribly useful anymore, reading through it I couldn't stop smiling. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Make-Your-Page-Guide-Kids/dp/0439134013 https://www.amazon.com/Make-Your-Page-Guide-Kids/dp/04391340... [2] I'm actually not sure if it was bootleg. I didn't just download a PDF, it was a website that seemed to just host the entirety of the content of the Sams book I think.
sevenseacat 9mo ago
I'm also coming up to 20 years of professional development (...ugh) but my entire career has been in web development... we don't have as many fun and interesting stories to share, I don't think. :(

252 points by vinhnx 9mo ago

> With a single jump to the processor's reset entry point, I had somehow inspired someone to step back from academic competition in order to have more fun with learning. Seems like it wasn't just the processor that reset.

tommica 9mo ago
Would love to hear the persons own story! What did they think? What happened afterwards? Where are they now?

arcfour 9mo ago

> At that point, the telecom carrier's representative intervened and bluntly told the set-top box representative to just shut up. This got a laugh out of me. The whole scenario was both hilarious and surreal from start to finish. It's a wonder what people get hung up on sometimes, even if getting hung up on it makes them look bad.

MBCook 9mo ago
All the STB guy had to say was that there was no way to get it smooth enough on real hardware. Instead he made himself look like an idiot. Great article.
- elmomle 9mo ago
  Like many people in the working world, he likely knew his company's policy but did not consider it important to know the reason, only to stand by the policy.
  - kcexn 9mo ago
    They should have known better. It was their job to sell the box. Instead they wasted a tonne of their clients money on a proof-of-concept for something that was never going to work. Using the word 'impossible' was probably also a big error. If it can perform computations, nothing is impossible, but some things are certainly not recommended.
    - pvtmert 9mo ago
      Probably they mentioned something like: "Not possible with current hardware speed" just to be translated as "impossible" since the recollection is second-hand.
      - tommica 9mo ago
        Doubt it, the team lead seemed technical enough that they would have picked that detail up.

1123581321 9mo ago

These were great. It’s certainly a blessing and curse to no longer dazzle people when solving a tech puzzle as a middle-aged person. I’m hoping I’ll become impressive again if I can still do it when I’m elderly. :)

jacquesm 9mo ago

> The installer, written in Python, often failed because of incorrect assumptions about the target environment and almost always required some manual intervention to complete successfully. Nothing ever changes. I spent half a day just getting some SDR development stuff to work just now, long live Python code with baked in hard dependencies on particular versions of obscure libraries... In the end it worked, but what a mess.

alexjplant 9mo ago
I've worked at a place or three where development environment setup took the better part of two days. Sometimes it was due to shitty proprietary software that nobody had bothered to automate the installation and configuration of. Other times it was due to an accumulation of crufty half-abandoned OSS projects with shell script glue liberally applied to hold it all together. In virtually all cases these environments would break randomly every few months and lead to unnecessary dev downtime. One place I worked decided that it'd be easier to build an AMI and provision quasi-ephemeral EC2 instances to developers instead of putting the time in to pare down the landfill of dev dependencies they had. This whole process was, of course, orchestrated by a custom CLI that would itself randomly break in odd ways. Fun times.
- reactordev 9mo ago
  I got let go once because they didn’t have setup instructions and hardcoded their own paths into scripts and things that “worked on their machine”. The reason they gave was “Unable to perform basic environment setup”. Some people are just born stupid.
  - collingreen 9mo ago
    Roughly this happened to me once. Got a horrible review after doing what I felt was a heros effort. I'll skip the details but the cherry on top was "you did all this work but it didnt build on the cloud server so we're not going to count it for anything" - the "cloud server" (of the live project) was the ctos laptop and it could only build his local stuff (you could even see the local paths in the web output). As if that wasn't enough, literally all he had to do was git pull and it would have all the new work on it. Cto was eventually fired for trying to steal the company IP and he went on to fail upward making a security camera company infra famously insecure and got a ton of very valuable stock for it. Life is weird!

latenightcoding 9mo ago

working in software before LLMs, you had to be there.

Luker88 9mo ago

for devops I highly recommend Davide Bianchi's "tales from the machine room". https://www.soft-land.org/cgi-bin/doc.pl?mode=setpreferredlanguage&language=en https://www.soft-land.org/cgi-bin/doc.pl?mode=setpreferredla...

cyode 9mo ago

> I could never register susam.com for myself though. That domain was always used by some business selling Turkish cuisines. Looks like the .com is for sale, in case you didn’t notice. https://sedo.com/search/?keyword=Susam.com https://sedo.com/search/?keyword=Susam.com You could probably acquire it (for less than asking price IMO) if you have a sentimental attachment. Nothing wrong with your .net, of course. Thanks for sharing the stories.

Yash16 9mo ago

[dead]

lubujackson 9mo ago

"You don't know what MITM attacks are? Well learn quick." I miss the days of having confidence in people to fill the gaps to do their job. Now we demand junior engineers to system design Twitter and memorize algo tricks for leetcode tests. These were useless measures before, hopefully LLMs finally kill them off for good.

davidmurdoch 9mo ago
> LLMs finally kill them off for good Juniors?
- idiotsecant 9mo ago
  No, humans
paulddraper 9mo ago
Now we have people who only do front end or only backend development. Only React or only Go.

tombert 9mo ago

I got a similar start actually. When I was in third grade, there was a scholastic book fair that was selling the book "Make Your Own Web Page! A Guide for Kids"[1]. The internet for nine year old me was this mysterious, opaque thing; I had no idea that you could just "make" a web page. I'm not sure I know what I thought it was, but I guess I assumed it was reserved for businesses or something, and I didn't realize it was something that a kid could do if they wanted to. It wasn't terribly expensive so I asked my mom and she bought it for me. I read through it and was immediately hooked. I know HTML isn't a "programming language", but in my nine year old mind I felt like some uber-hacker writing code and seeing it render on the screen made me feel so cool. It didn't hurt that the internet was still novel enough (~1999-2000) that my third grade teacher was extremely impressed that I did this by myself after I presented it to class for show and tell, and she actually called my parents to tell them how impressed she was. Later I got into proper programming with a bootleg copy of "Sams Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours" [2], a book on ActionScript I had found at Goodwill to use with a pirated copy of Flash MX 2004, and a C++ book that I got for my birthday one year. I eventually became reasonably ok at software stuff and I've built a decent career out of it. I actually tracked down a copy of that original "Make Your Own Web Page!" on eBay and read through it again about two years ago, and while the HTML in there is dated and it's not terribly useful anymore, reading through it I couldn't stop smiling. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Make-Your-Page-Guide-Kids/dp/0439134013 https://www.amazon.com/Make-Your-Page-Guide-Kids/dp/04391340... [2] I'm actually not sure if it was bootleg. I didn't just download a PDF, it was a website that seemed to just host the entirety of the content of the Sams book I think.

sevenseacat 9mo ago

I'm also coming up to 20 years of professional development (...ugh) but my entire career has been in web development... we don't have as many fun and interesting stories to share, I don't think. :(