I had to change some code on some of our data acquisition system while we were flying on NASA's KC-135 (also known as the vomit comet) back in the early 90's. Some water condensation was dripping from the ceiling on the keyboard while the other experimenters nearby were barfing their brains out. I've been in more optimal situations.
Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in?
61–70 of 75 posts
Re: Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in?
#62On a balcony overlooking Western Baghdad figuring out why our (old and pretty well tested) network code didn't see fit to push packets. Was outside because we suspected the sat terminal was causing the problem. Only ended up taking a couple hours but it was probably my least favourite coding/debugging session.
You win. :)
These stories are so incredible they might be able to compile a real "Extreme Programming" book
Re: Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in?
#63Half a mile underground in a gold mine. While sitting on top of a lift cage, little stones bouncing off my hard hat while somebody leaned over the laptop to keep the water from dripping on it.
Re: Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in?
#64Not working conditions per se, but debugging a legacy bioinformatics program written in perl. Comments were in french which I do not understand. It took three days to run and exited with: "Error - good luck finding the bug".
Ooh, and it insulted you ! And in French, too (I presume). Total burn.
I was fail all round :)
Re: Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in?
#65A hot, noisy hotel room, dial-up internet, 4:00am writing in _VB6_ to connect to some weird COM+ service that used VB calling conventions, then a C++ COM wrapper for that, then a C wrapper to connect to a Java JNI service. At 8:00pm I didn't know VB, either. And it had to work by 9:00am when some system it interfaced to started up. Oh - and I couldn't actually test it against anything but stubs.
How did that turn out? What was your margin of safety? I hope they appreciated the heroic effort you put forth. I haven't done anything that crazy but have debugged (and fixed) a few memorable, painful, stressful software (usually system integration) problems on frantic conference calls mere hours before the paid-for-and-scheduled on-site training on the software commenced.
Worked fine, stayed in production use for years - might still be there for all I know. And no, it wasn't appreciated of course....
"Safety margin"! What's that? ;)
Re: Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in?
#66Well, I nearly killed myself with a line of bad code. I made a silly change to a flight simulator's "unusual attitude" logic. Unusual attitude training consists of putting the aircraft in a very difficult orientation (45 deg nose down, 60 deg left bank, etc.) and training pilots to recover. Here's what the simulators look like: http://blafsen.net/photos/simulator.jpg I changed the code, and brought the simulator up o…
It's still incredible that you controlled those massive machines. I would love to hear more about that.
(blush) thanks. We use these simulators for training - it's cheaper/safer than the real aircraft.
- The pilots and instructor inside the cabin manipulate controls/switches/CBs/panels, sending signals to an bunch of interface cards.
- The interface cards convert voltages to values, and move them into a big chunk of shared memory on the host computer.
- The host computer recalculates the new state of the simulation, updating everything in the shared memory, 60 times a second.
- New values in the shared memory are sent to the interface cards.
- The interface cards convert values to voltages, driving the instruments, sound, visual and motion systems.
It all happens so fast that the pilots never sense the latency between their action and the effects in the cockpit. The host computer is the brain of the system, that's why a small bug there can be dangerous.
Re: Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in?
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does php really deserve a sob?
Have you ever been forced to program in PHP?
Yes, and then someone forced me to code in ColdFusion and run EXCEL imports into a really bad CF ORM with SQL server on the backend.
I now freelance django / RoR and PHP and I do not complain about any of them, ever. ColdFusion is the language one should be forced to work with whenever they complain about any other language, it will fix their aversion to the language in question very, very quickly.
Re: Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in?
#68Coming to work from 8:30 to 5:30, sitting in a cubicle with a forced dress code, while writing in... sob PHP. Rails freelance is awesome.
Does php really deserve a sob?
Yes. Sometimes.
PHP is a great language for the basic stuff, but you try to do serious things with it and you have to wrestle with it. And it's all so ... badly designed. You sob because it can all be done so much better and... cleaner.
Re: Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in?
#69This is not my story of course but the story that immediately popped in my memory when I read the title. Steve Wozniak's story about rewriting floppy drive low-level software the morning of a big demo: >I got it to where it was writing data on a track, reading the data on a track. Then I got it to where it was reading the data in the right byte positions. Then I got it to work with shifting tracks, and we wanted a si…
Truly inspirational. No complaints (I guess) if you're working in the trenches, it always helps if you're onto something great.
Re: Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in?
#70Well, I nearly killed myself with a line of bad code. I made a silly change to a flight simulator's "unusual attitude" logic. Unusual attitude training consists of putting the aircraft in a very difficult orientation (45 deg nose down, 60 deg left bank, etc.) and training pilots to recover. Here's what the simulators look like: http://blafsen.net/photos/simulator.jpg I changed the code, and brought the simulator up o…
Ha, cool, I used to work at Rediffusion and I heard a similar story about when a UPS pilot got the SC to do the phugoid behaviour 'properly' by taking him up in a plane to experience it.
When they tried it in the sim, both of them were similarly thrown around and a terrified few seconds as neither were able to reach the panic button :-)