Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
blog.nikitas.link
Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
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Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#2I recently looked back on some old projects of mine, it was rather painful.
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#3Oof. I didn't realize "harm" was meant so literally. At least it was a one-time thing, though... right? I read "had several thousand WAV audio files that I generated" and expected to read something of the form "I corrupted several thousand important data files irreversibly".
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#4I recently looked back on some old projects of mine, it was rather painful.
Not directly related. I recently read some of the English work I did as a kid. It was painful to read.
Still, this is how we learn. We make some ridiculously bad choices and we hope to learn from those.
I guess what I am saying is: if you are looking at past work and feeling bad/embarrased, likely you have gotten better.
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#5A few years ago, I ordered the cheapest six-axis robotic arm from ebay for about $100 that came with basically no software or motor-driver boards, so I did it all from scratch with a PCA9685 board, a basic kernel driver and some very hacky scripts from user space.
One day I had some friends over for a glass of wine, and wanted to show off my creation. I invited them into my "lab" and placed my wine glass down on the desk so I could type a few commands with both hands.
My rudimentary software had some motion smoothing once it was up and running, but upon initialization, if the arm was significantly displaced from where it had been when it was turned off, the PWM board would instruct the motor to immediately "be" in a position that required the arm to travel clear across the desk in effectively as little time as possible.
In this case, where it had been previously happened to be where my wine glass was now, and the flimsy aluminum at high speed was enough to shear the stem from the glass and explode the bulb. Luckily the wine didn't get in any sensitive electronics, but I learned a valuable lesson about the difference between messing around with hardware vs software.
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#6Oof. I didn't realize "harm" was meant so literally. At least it was a one-time thing, though... right? I read "had several thousand WAV audio files that I generated" and expected to read something of the form "I corrupted several thousand important data files irreversibly".
Haha yeah. I've definitely "harmed" myself in the form of time lost from deleting files/messing something up on my computer, but I think this was the only time I've actually experienced physical pain from my own bad code.
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#7I have. Back in early days of Oculus, I was using one of the development kits (DK2?, maybe DK1) and making something in Unity. The Oculus had one screen, with lenses over the left and right halves. To give depth perception, it renders a view for each eye, and shows them in a vertical split screen. Some script had a bug, and none of that happened; Instead it simply stretched a normal view across both screens.
I put the headset on, and quickly noticed things weren't working right. I was walking around, trying to figure out what the issue was. Trying walking back any forth looking at a wall in front of me, I felt terrible pain. Something about the left and right eyes seeing movement in different directions across their entire field of view really breaks the brain. It was very sharp and localized too.
The brain's perception system is weird.
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#8Sounds like endianness is now a safety issue.
As for me... I've certainly made it so things that shouldn't be hot to the touch are hot to the touch.
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#9A few years ago, I ordered the cheapest six-axis robotic arm from ebay for about $100 that came with basically no software or motor-driver boards, so I did it all from scratch with a PCA9685 board, a basic kernel driver and some very hacky scripts from user space. One day I had some friends over for a glass of wine, and wanted to show off my creation. I invited them into my "lab" and placed my wine glass down on the…
That's a good story. Yeah I feel like there must be soo many more opportunities to physically damage/harm something from robotics than software alone.
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#10I'm not sure if you ever write rage comments, just laced with profanity and nonsense, complaining about the situation at hand... I've written my fair share, I used to work with a lot of perl and bash, and I'd come across some disgusting ideas that had made their way into scripts and utilities. Naturally, finding some of that crap after an hours long search for some bugged behavior, it can be very frustrating and irritating to find out that it all stemmed from someone doing an easy task in a stupid way!
I once had someone leave me a message on my desk phone referring to one of these comments verbosely, and I happened to be listening to my messages on speakerphone as the day was almost over and we were all doing our little ritual tasks before we walked out the doors for the evening. So, this comment starts being read and all my neighbors are packing up their lunchboxes or tidying papers on desks, etc. As the message went on, I could hear the silence enveloping me, because of course it was wildly heinous, and I just froze up and let it play out. It wasn't that I couldn't have jumped over there and hung up the phone but it was so casual that it just caught me off guard that someone would read that awful crap I wrote right into my voicemail! I remember the end being sorta like "anyhow, that's not a very good practice, so don't write them like that anymore". I don't really even remember exactly what happened next other than leaving with my tail between my legs. I don't think anybody mentioned it to me. I guess it seemed worse in the moment of it.
This was well over 20 years ago now, I was basically brand new to everything. That was a turning point, thankfully enough.
Reading open source has exposed me to a LOT of different commenting practices. I don't really think about it often enough, but the human on other side is always the most important consideration.