181–190 of 363 posts
1e7 copies * 10 hours * 60 minutes * 60 seconds * 30fps * 1280 * 720 ~~ 300 quadrillion
The students would forget to tell the student organisation when they moved or got a new phone number, but they'd always remembered to inform the university.
Importing data meant getting an email, containing a CSV file, parse the data and lookup the students in our own database and update their information. Because I'd just setup the qmail mail server, and learning about .qmail files and mail queues in general, I just hooked the script into the .qmail file. I figured it would save me the type of dealing with the IMAP server.
I think it was six years later, maybe a little more, when I got a call from someone that the student organisation, asking if I could explain how the student address information was kept up to date. They knew that the data came from the university administration, but it just sort of disappeared into the belly of the mail server.
Amazed and impressed that clever people are using and maintaining this at https://github.com/massemanet/distel.
(I had hoped the answer would be the Java arcade game I wrote in ~1997, Araknoid, but that seems to have disappeared from the internets.)
I still have the conversation (from 2000) with Daniel Robbins, founder of the Gentoo Linux distribution, where we discussed the name collision. There was no issue, we just both agreed to peacefully co-exist. :)
Very cool, since I learned that he, like me, came from an Amiga background. Although he out-cooled me by a laaarge margin, having worked at semi-legendary game company Psygnosis.
Many bank payment and loan systems are written in COBOL. Banks are so afraid to change them that there are often not even plans to upgrade them. When a change absolutely has to be made, they need to call the developers back from retirement...
As crazy as it would be to learn COBOL today, I've heard you can pretty much name your price for these sorts of jobs. They're definitely out there, too -- I saw one job listing in 2014 for a postal worker credit union that was looking for someone to pick up rudimentary COBOL from a pending retiree so they could still support their system.
Many bank payment and loan systems are written in COBOL. Banks are so afraid to change them that there are often not even plans to upgrade them. When a change absolutely has to be made, they need to call the developers back from retirement...
As crazy as it would be to learn COBOL today, I've heard you can pretty much name your price for these sorts of jobs. They're definitely out there, too -- I saw one job listing in 2014 for a postal worker credit union that was looking for someone to pick up rudimentary COBOL from a pending retiree so they could still support their system.
Nevertheless, my own examples are all non-games. In the early nineties I wrote a program in Turbo Pascal to manage grades and print report cards, I heard one elementary school in my home town was using this until 2012.
On one of my first web programming jobs, I made a cold fusion-like template interpreter and ecommerce engine in C, that was about 1998. One completely online-based company that we launched with this software kept on running on it until it was sold two years ago.
In the early 2000s, my startup produced a web content management system that I wrote most of the code for, and sometimes I still get usage questions about it even today (to be honest, knowing that code is still used in production is not a good feeling).
Oh, I just remembered: around that time I wrote some microcontroller code that went into a certain brand of PA systems for TV studios, I'm pretty sure that's still in use...
My oldest personal project is a chat place where RPG players can meet up and roll dice, I think that launched around 2003 in some incarnation and though it's getting updates and extensions from time to time, the core code is almost unchanged: https://rolz.org
My "personal" website that I made when I was a kid at 2001. I think that I uploaded it to the Geocities free hosting and soon forgot about it. Then a few years back when I googled my name I stumbled upon it haha It is still up after more than 15 years on god know which free hosting and server, it was so funny. And of course it is used as a joke now by my friends :) And of course I have forgot my credentials long long…
According to Google translate, chess has been interested in you since you were little.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A great example of why we tell people to forget using a substandard approach and language for "quick and dirty code that will probably get thrown away." A lot of long-lasting code started out exactly that way. ;)
You neglect something I think is very important: You do not normally know up front what code will live and not. If you carefully (over-)engineer everything you will perhaps not get time to write all those short-lived failures that preceded that long-lasting success. Of course I wish that piece of code that I hacked 3 years ago and never got around to refactor was better done the first time! But that kind of thinking…