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I spent the past two and a half years building prototype features for a large internal application. One month ago, the CFO decided that as a part of organizational restructuring, the company will no longer invest in the application. New development on it is ending, and the entire application may potentially be deprecated at some point in the future in favor of cheap dashboards. I am being moved to the team that build…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
During my tenure in college, had a professor that would write 10s or 100s of line of code to do things that could literally be done in one or two. Pointed this out to him a couple of times, not that I had been a dev for 15 years at this point. Everytime he squashed anything I said. Comes to end of semester project. Within 24 hours of him handing it out, myself and team handed in final solution, which absolutely worke…
I tried to place out of an intro-to-programming course in a back-to-school bout of scholastic achievement. I wasn't allowed to test out of it despite the coursewor being rote and that anyone with 2 seconds looking at my CV could see I did not need it. Anyway - they released the assignments on day 1. I turned them in on day 2. I still had to go to class. Stupid. My "filesystems and database design" class was basically…
I grew up very poor, so finishing uni was like, an achievement I had to do, but I learnt C++ and HL2 modding and other computer stuff back in highschool.
My uni experience was 7 years of hell (multiple gap years to go do real work before coming back). Getting stuff like "pseudocode can't have an equal sign in it, so NC" on assignments.
"Even if you finish all the assignments you must attend every tutorial or you pass"
Ive told many academics to go to hell. I'm not paid to be there like they are.
My grades go from "barely passed" to "high distinction" like a rollercoaster each year.
- and yet, I still really wanted to like uni. I do still want to like it, it's just a shame about the academics
I spent the past two and a half years building prototype features for a large internal application. One month ago, the CFO decided that as a part of organizational restructuring, the company will no longer invest in the application. New development on it is ending, and the entire application may potentially be deprecated at some point in the future in favor of cheap dashboards. I am being moved to the team that build…
I'm sorry to say this, but I think you're going to be laid off at some point.
I built the best site out there for playing magic the gathering online. It's way better than any other available option. I've never shared it with the magic community because I think wizards of the coast would just send me a cease and desist, so three years of work is just sitting idle. I'm still not sure how I feel about it.
OK listen up dude. > I built the best site out there for playing magic the gathering online. No you didn't! You built the best site out there for playing trading card games . It just so happens that it's very easy to point to your own local card/rule sets, share them with peers, and play together online. And if the cards/rules being used by the clients happen to be MTG cards/rules, oh well! That's out of your hands.…
First time I was programming in the scripting language, but after reading the docs to grok the syntax and standard library apis and a repl to test out code snippets, I was good to go.
I open the script.
If you've ever transferred a CRLF-delimited text file to a UNIX-like OS and back, you know what I saw.
The script alternated between code and blank lines. Someone had committed the code after some tool somewhere along the way did a CRLF->LFLF->CRLFCRLF roundtrip.
And no one decided to bite the bullet and cleanup the mess.
Sigh.
After spending a couple of days to get the script running on test documents and understanding the code flow, I discovered two things:
1 - a coder had inserted a one minute sleep() call delay into the script (so the script's output could be checked?) That coder committed the change which was rolled out into production!
2 - the script had two large if statements, each several hundreds of lines long. There were a handful of differences in the two if statements - took me at least half a day to confirm that there were only a handful of trivial differences.
I removed the sleep call and refactored the two if statements into two function calls with the few variable arguments required and created one function to handle the functionality of those two large if statements.
I also removed all the extraneous blank lines.
In the end:
- reduced the script's line count by 75% (half the lines were blank, consolidated the two large if statements into one function and invoked the function 2x)
- reduced the runtime by one minute per document processed
The company didn't believe me when I mentioned the sleep() call in the script. I had to open the script on the production box and show them the sleep() call.
I committed my refactored script and got assigned to another project.
One year later, I ask how the new script was doing in production.
The people responsible for the daily monitoring of the document processing say that they're still using the old script.
Oh.
That's nice.
I hope they took out the one minute sleep() call at least.
This is old, but my most pointless project: The CEO wanted a screen in every hall that showed the company "EnGUAGEment meter". Users would have to go to the app, choose from 10 or so canned messages like "Feeling productive", "Ready to conquer the day", and other such HR speak the CEO (or rather the HR committee he put on the important business of picking the list) felt was motivational. This would update a page that…
Worked for a client via freelancing. Built 3 projects, all failed. He likes to follow the trends, first SaaS, then crypto/blockchain, and now AI. He apparently raises money, pays himself and builds bullshit projects. That's it. But while doing so, he does everything to look like a legit startup. Ngl, he was my first major client with whom I gained a lot of experience, but it doesn't change the fact that he is a hype…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go out with a bang. Release it, enjoy your 15 minutes in the spotlight, and when the lawyers come a-knocking, shut it down. Or make it open source and let the community take the wheel and the responsibility. You never know what opportunities this adventure might bring, but certainly more than just keeping it on your hard drive. Go for it mate.
I may indeed do this. There is an outstanding issue I have to address that I've never quite worked up the motivation to deal with: Heroku restarts their servers once every 24 hours with only thirty seconds' warning. Since the games are in-memory, this of course kicks everyone out of whatever games they may be in the middle of. I guess the solution is to have the games be on Redis instead of in-memory? I'm a bit more…
Kiosk Banking. Back in the 1990's, just before the web became a thing, it was an idea to bring banking to consumers without the bank buildking, which they called "brickless banking". Kiosks would be placed in public locations like malls. Customers would enter the kiosk, close the curtain or door, then connect via video-call with one of the agent in the call centres. Depending what product the customer wanted (mortgag…
I spent the past two and a half years building prototype features for a large internal application. One month ago, the CFO decided that as a part of organizational restructuring, the company will no longer invest in the application. New development on it is ending, and the entire application may potentially be deprecated at some point in the future in favor of cheap dashboards. I am being moved to the team that build…
I've tried to explain prototypes, draft/paper versions. People just nod and wonder why they can't use it yet. They live in their bubble and you live in yours
To be honest if you made 10 prototypes it just looks like you can't finish anything. Not that you're a genius problem solver.
Make something that barely works and then hand it over to them and don't look back. Ship it.