151–160 of 794 posts
After the first lecture of my first programming course in college, I went to the Professor Tewksbury and started to tell him about a simulator I was writing to help other students check their work. He holds up his hand to stop me speaking, says “you have an A. Don’t come to class anymore.” So, I never went to class or did any of the assigned work, instead working on the simulator in my dormroom. At the end of the ter…
My very first full-time job was to adapt a COTS ATM protocol stack to run on embedded devices to power a truck & satellite network. The deadline was 1 year to get the stack running on the hardware, and would be the first of 4 annual milestones related to the project. After about 6 months, I was mostly done the work when I found out that the project was moving to a single release at the 4 year mark. Ok, not so bad, ex…
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…
Sometimes management decides it’s worth it to spend staff time on something even though there’s a non-zero probability it will never be used. If there’s no fire during the firefighter’s shift, we don’t conclude her time was wasted and that we should never have had the firefighter.
I once worked on an in-house ERP system which had been developed over about 15 years by various developers. It was the engine of the entire company, everything passed through it. The CFO and some senior leadership erroneously blamed it for their shortcomings/used it as a scapegoat. When new management took charge, an initiative was started to replace the system with an industry standard solution. Both myself and the…
> the vendor gleefully assured us that they were experienced with "migrations of this scale" Sales is mostly just lying to collect a commission check.
But there was a service, AdWhatever, which let users go onto a sub-site of Amazon.com and just casually? recreationally? vote between two ads. You would be presented with two B&W images and click the one you liked more. I don't know that there was any incentive to do this, but I think it was a Bezos idea.
I didn't develop it, but all the routine maintenance tasks that came along (remove this deprecated library, migrate to new hardware, update your pipeline) needed to be done for AdWhatever too. That stupid service lingered for years after it was clear nobody used it, but we had to keep maintaining it until we got the go-ahead to tear it down.
I built the best site out there for playing magic the gathering online. It's way better than any other available option. I've never shared it with the magic community because I think wizards of the coast would just send me a cease and desist, so three years of work is just sitting idle. I'm still not sure how I feel about it.
Off topic, but I recently looked in to playing MtG again because my son expressed interest. But, I was a bit taken aback by how different the environment is. I last played when they still had numbered "base sets", e.g., "9th Edition", and then rotating "blocks" of three smaller-but-more-advanced sets. I was assuming I would go in and buy a couple of starter decks from the most recent numbered "edition" to start teach…
They had a Jumpstart product, where you could buy two half-decks and mix them together. But it looks like the last printing of that was 2022.
If you don't mind spending the time, you could just craft a starter deck on paper or find a list online, and then order the individual cards from a website. As long as you avoid the must-have cards for competitive players, it'll be cheap.
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…
One of my major tricks is to just wait before doing things. And ask If doing this should be done instead of that. this helps to eliminate greatly this scenario.
He inspired me to take April Fool's seriously. I've since changed industries but last year I jumped on the AI bandwagon with https://chatellite.space and this year a nod to a popular mobile game https://flappysat.space .
Functionally completely useless but they taught me a lot and made some people laugh.