61–70 of 794 posts
That’s one of the most important lessons any good programmer learns at some point. We aren’t building monuments in software, everything we do is disposable and will eventually be someone else’s curse in the future.
I'm trying to teach myself how to sniff and interact with i2c hardware on consumer products. I'm doing this by attempting to connect my standing desk to the internet. Literally the whole goal is to have a "make desk go up" and "make desk go down" button in my Home Assistant. The real goal is learning to sniff i2c though.
That's far from useless though. There have been times where I've wished that I had an I2C expert so I could say "this thing is acting weird. Here's a bus analyzer and there's the code. Go fix it."
I worked for a company that used to resell a single-board computer used for control applications. The vendor was getting antsy because we were always late paying our bills. Our company owner didn't like their complaints, so I was told to design one that was "better than theirs." That's it. That was the entire spec. OK, I was also told that customer X would like a board that they can program in C (current board had a…
The project itself was a mess. There were GUID-named Visual Studio solutions for every combination of values of three variables; hundreds of solutions that grew every month. The output of these projects was a spreadsheet that was then manually compared to the previous months' output.
This was all lead and managed by one of the top consulting firms in the US.
After a quick debug session, the problem was clear: the methods to call was being searched using a linear search. I changed the search to use a hashtable and the function disappeared from the list of most CPU consuming functions.
After running both implementations for a couple of weeks to make sure my implementation was right, I made a PR, which wasn't approved. The manager said my change was too risky to go to production, even though the implementation was simple and I spent two weeks making sure it was ok. They're probably still using the linear search.
There are a lot of dead ends in software. You get over it after awhile, just keep coding.
As an analyst, I've worked on my fair share of projects that have never seen the light of day, and essentially just ended up in a black hole. A scenario like that typically goes like this: - Client orders an analysis of something. They want all corners covered, and because they'll use it as evidence/argument/pitch or whatever, you're likely working on a tight deadline. - You (and others) work tirelessly through the n…
this helps to eliminate greatly this scenario.
My old post is relevant here, “Why I prefer making useless stuff”. Which is very different than working on useless stuff at work! https://austinhenley.com/blog/makinguselessstuff.html
Did you ever make that typed lisp compiler? Asking for a friend.