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I want to hear some of the fun and crazy hacks. No need to mention the company or product to protect the innocent :).
A friend of mine was once contacted to build an app for a respectable non-profit with a low-ish budget.
The developer friend thought "this app as described would be WAY better as a website with some app-like features, not an app-store app. Tons of people will want it as a website but not as an app...it'll just sit in the app store unused. Give people a way to find the pages of the app via third-party search engine and it'll probably be amazing." So he planned to start building it in a hybrid style, just in case.
The proposal to build an app went forward, and was accepted.
The non-profit then requested some significant new, scope-changing features during the project discussions.
The developer said, "those new features will cost extra, do you want an estimate?" and gave them an estimate.
The client said they didn't have the budget but still wanted the features. Possible?
So the developer said "we could include those features, and really beautifully so, if you decided to make it a website. But then it wouldn't be an 'app' in the traditional sense anymore, with the manifest and all that offline stuff, to say nothing of app-store presence, because of budget reasons X, Y, and Z. The best you could call it is a web app."
The client immediately said "it doesn't matter, a web app is fine as long as we let people know to download important data from the web version before they go offline! Really that's our only hurdle here!"
The developer said "WTF, OK" but made a note of the discussion, and built a lovely new website and it worked great. The website contained warnings--grab this data if you go offline, and so on.
People loved the web experience, it was one-of-a-kind and got lots of compliments.
Still, later on, organizational stakeholders tried to hold the non-profit responsible for calling it an "app"...meanwhile it was more like a website?! What is this, some kind of a scam? Show me where it is in the app store?
The NPO staff pushed back on the developer friend. He said, "ah, but you remember our discussion...? You wanted extra features but didn't have the budget. So I gave you a choice and YOU made the choice to no longer build an app in that sense. And by the way--it's still technically an app...oh and also your organic search presence is so much better with this thing exposed to search engines..."
So: The app, that wasn't. But was? But also wasn't. He never expected the term "app" to require so much hacking.
if (foo == null) {
return
}
This reminded me of a story. A friend of mine was once contacted to build an app for a respectable non-profit with a low-ish budget. The developer friend thought "this app as described would be WAY better as a website with some app-like features, not an app-store app. Tons of people will want it as a website but not as an app...it'll just sit in the app store unused. Give people a way to find the pages of the app via…
I worked for a company who opened up their API to audio hardware manufacturers to allow integration with our streaming service. One particular company had a rigorous test: Query 20 songs via our API (one song per query - random songs selected so caching playlists would not work), retrieve and parse the metadata to display info on their hardware within 23 seconds.
The test had to use the same public API endpoint as our own customers (via our music app).
Their test lab was in Los Angeles. Our data and API endpoint was in Dublin. Using the public internet they managed to load 13 songs at most. I was tasked with reducing the latency.
To pass the test I deployed a temporary read-only copy of the app in a data centre in LA and used Route53's geolocation routing functionality to route the testers requests transparently to the local app. The DNS was live for 24hrs.
We passed the tests despite not reflecting any real world conditions and the hardware company promoted integration with our platform for years afterwards.
I piggy backed some code on the job validation interface to attach the users requests to the job's environment variables. Then I wrote a daemon to run on the compute nodes that walked the jobs process group/tree, grabbed the environment variables[1], and managed cgroups.
Super quick and dirty but it worked well enough that we kept it in place for years despite the fact the bug had been long addressed.
[1]: it was was safe to use environment variables as they were stored RO on disk by the batch system itself.
The architecture of the app had a different look and feel for the public/admin sides, but it was rolled into a single ball of mud.
The development pace of the team was glacial, because they had to restyle 50% of the framework defaults.
I dug through the code and realized that the reason some components looked so terrible was that they were built with different em basis. So I forked one framework, and wrote a script to find any lines terminating with ‘em’ or ‘rem’, extract the value, and multiply it by a const and then rewrite it in pixels.
This worked almost perfectly except for a few collisions with some other uncommon css property name. It allowed us to keep using those frameworks without needing to restyle things over and over again Which saved a ton of time in getting early pages shipped.
Reminded me of game developer who explained an null pointer exception. There was a function that kept getting a null passed and that broke the whole system. They searched for months trying to figure out why, and they couldn't. so at the end they just did a if (foo == null) { return } worked like a charm.
Pandora just launched. I was installing a CCTV system at the first restaurant location. Wanted to show the owner something cool, launched pandora on the PC I just installed for him.
"That's awesome, can we hear it in the restaurant?".
The amp was about 50' from the office, I had pre made camera cables with BNC and found enough adapters to make it to the AMP.
Now he was REALLY impressed.
He then asked if he could make announcements over the restaurant speakers from the PC. Sure as shit, I'm going all the way.
Fire up VB6 and search google for "Volume Mixer VB6". Made a little tray app to mute the wave out and unmute the Mic. It works!
Then he asks: "We want to make the announcement from the guest check out counter". To get this done, I took some phone cable, soldered 2 wires to a paperclip i broke apart, then jammed the paper clip ends into the LPT port and searched google "VB6 LPT READ". Found a nice one liner that returned a different value when the wires were shorted and then adjusted the volume mixer for the announcement.
I didn't have a push button switch for remote control but had an extra IBM PS2 mouse, so I soldered the phone cord directly to the microswitch on the left mouse button clicker and jammed a sheetrock screw to mount the mouse directly to the wall. Now he can press the button and talk to all his customers.
This was crap I had sitting in my 1990 Buick Rivera. I think I was charging $40.00/hr. back then.
They were super litigious. And the contract had metrics we had to hit with our services or they wouldn't pay us.
I was building the service. The customer was load testing it.
My manager had me on the phone in his lap while he was in the office with them. He had another back channel to the server guy who was monitoring the load.
He was whispering "Defcon 1" if the server started creaking and I needed to switch to a perl script that used cached data. If he said "Defcon 2" I was supposed to switch to sending a static file. Can't remember if we got to Defcon 2 or not, I think we did.
It was pretty nuts to deal with that customer. We passed the load test.