• tiredofsametab@fedia.io
    7·
    8 hours ago

    Someone would have to look at and understand the existing code and infrastructure rather than just throwing it all away and writing a data migration. In other words, it would never happen.

  • MTK@lemmy.world
    10·
    13 hours ago

    And it will always end with a more modern and streamlined infrastructure that they never update again and then two years later there is an article that shows how they all went bankrupt.

  • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
    32·
    19 hours ago

    This was my entire 25-year career. No way in hell would I want to watch a show like that.

    Although if there were a show based on my career, I’m sure the highest ratings would be the show where my coworker fires a 125 mph knuckle ball a foot above a 10-year-old kid’s head. It was the only time in my career when I had to physically intervene to prevent a fistfight between my boss and the client.

      • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
        42·
        18 hours ago

        We got hired by a company that was developing a remote-controlled baseball launching machine. The machine itself was just the standard two spinning wheels (although the max rotational speed of 125 mph was a lot for this sort of thing), but it could also pivot 360 degrees and also angle itself between straight up and 45 degrees down towards the ground, so it was capable of simulating any hit ball in baseball. The idea was that you would put this machine at home plate and then the coach could walk out among the players and use the remote (which was a Windows Mobile PDA) to generate any kind of hit, like a grounder to short or a pop fly to right field etc. Because the wheels could be independently controlled, you could put any kind of spin you wanted on a ball by having one wheel spinning faster than the other.

        Really a cool device and a cool project, but my coworker who got the gig was a remarkably terrible programmer who spent more than a year fucking things up in various ways. At one point, for example, he spent three months trying to develop a Physics engine to control where the ball went, despite the fact that a) he knew nothing about Physics, and b) the Physics of a spinning baseball is actually incredibly complicated and well beyond the processing power of a PDA circa 2005. Not to mention that the balls used varied tremendously in how old and scuffed up they were, which would have defeated any attempt to calculate where they were going with any kind of real precision.

        Despite being well over budget and past the original schedule, he had things sort of working (sometimes) and the client asked him to produce a variant of the software that would let the machine be used by Little League coaches. My coworker in addition to writing the version to scale back the speeds appropriately, also decided to completely change the API that was used to communicate with the machine. Previously, the speeds had been specified by short integer values between 0 and 32768, but he decided it would be better to use floating-point values between 0 and 1. All well and good, except his way of dealing with the huge amount of compiler errors this generated was to cast all the hard-coded short int values as floats and clamp the result between 0.0 and 1.0.

        As bad as this was, he also decided to test this version - for the first time - on a field with actual Little Leaguers (in his defense - but only slightly - we rarely had access to the actual machine itself, so proper testing was always difficult). The coach sent the command for a slow grounder to the shortstop. This should have produced a horizontal ball with about a 30 mph speed on the bottom wheel and 35 mph on the top wheel to give it some topspin. Instead, his hard-code int values were about 10000 and 12000, which got cast and clamped to 1.0 by the API call - in other words, maximum speed (125 mph) on both wheels. This ejected a ball with no spin going 125 mph, the most deadly knuckleball in human history (human pitchers throw knucklers at maybe 50 mph and they’re nearly impossible to hit or even catch). At least he had the angle and azimuth “right” so this was fired straight at the shortstop! Had it hit him, the kid for sure would have badly concussed and very possibly killed, but fortunately it sailed just over his head.

          • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
            21·
            15 hours ago

            And this wasn’t even his biggest disaster as long as you don’t count the potential for death. The baseball-throwing gig was just him and his manager; for his next project he led a team of five developers that turned three months into three years and never produced working software. The only revenue it ever produced was an initial $50K from the client that was later refunded to preempt a lawsuit. For the project he chose Ruby-on-Rails despite the fact that neither he nor anybody else on the team - nor anybody else in the entire state for that matter - had any experience with RoR. I have to give him credit, though: he was a true Renaissance Man in the sense that he could fuck up a project in any language or platform.

  • vrkr@programming.dev
    12·
    22 hours ago

    Still have a copy of Ubu 8.04 on CD somewhere. Not sure if it still works though.

    Good times.

    • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      3·
      9 hours ago

      I wonder if there is a forgotten torrent of the ISO somewhere floating around with users still seeding it

  • dumbass@quokk.auEnglish
    36·
    1 day ago

    It surprises me that there aren’t more shows like that, just some random dude bursting through your job calling you all twats and pointing out where you failed, then helping you fix it.

    I want carwash nightmares or retail nightmares shows.

  • philthi@lemmy.world
    151·
    55 minutes ago

    I would watch this. Especially if it was an angry Brit, rather than a dramatic American. And even more if it didn’t keep replaying the same 5 minutes of telly before and after each ad break. And even more if it didn’t have an ad break every 10 minutes that lasted 5 minutes.